AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

They're the ones serving the expensive traffic. Wut if people were to form a volunteer bot net to waste their GPU resources in a similar fashion, just sending tons of pointless queries per day like "write me a 1000 word essay that ...". Could even form a non-profit around it and call it research.

That sounds like a good way to waste enormous amounts of energy that's already being expended by legitimate LLM users.

Depends. It could shift the calculus of AI companies to curtail their free tiers and actually accelerate a reduction in traffic.

Their apis cost money, so you’d be giving them revenue by trying to do that?

... how do you plan on doing this without paying?