Someone who is using a residential proxy network, headless browsing, and/or TLS fingerprint manipulation to evade rate limits and other controls to issue large volumes of automated requests under a deceptive UserAgent string isn't difficult to describe and differentiate versus a normal user using a UA.

The proposed text of the bill is rather straightforward. It turns more on the "stealth" bit than "bot".

(a) Prohibition.—A person may not—

(1) deploy, direct, or cause to be deployed, a stealth bot to access a website, digital platform, or online service in a manner that is reasonably likely to damage, impair, or burden the technical or commercial operation of a website or other internet service; or

(2) intentionally misrepresent, conceal, or obscure the nature of the bot to appear as a human user for use in connection with a generative AI model or service.

(6) STEALTH BOT.—The term “stealth bot” means a bot that accesses, retrieves, scans, indexes, scrapes, or otherwise interacts with a website, digital platform, or online service without prior disclosure of its identity and purpose, in particular by—

(A) failing to identify itself including through a valid and accurate user-agent string; or

(B) failing to disclose the specific nature and purpose of the bot, including any proposed use and purpose of page content (including text and data mining, search indexing, inferencing, artificial intelligence development, support, or operations (such as training, fine tuning, retrieval augmented generation)) or other automated processing at the time access is requested and in a format that the website operator can access.

A web browser isn't a bot as long as it's controlled by a human but it becomes one once it's automated.

You are entitled to your own emails, posts, etc but you are not entitled to crawl the internet for your own purposes without stating what they are and allowing websites an opt out.

It's a human level distinction that doesn't have technical distinction—the law handles these kinds of things just fine. The flesh doesn't know the difference between manslaughter and murder but we humans can figure it out well enough.

The world you envision where we decide that the law can't assess intent is certainly an interesting one but I don't think it would be the most functional.

A browser does not send 10k requests per minute to open a webpage. Even in the most and modern bloated webpages. And even if it did it wouldn't be to a single website.

A user operating a scraper or a crawler IS operating a scraper or a crawler.

The legal system isn't stupid - it doesn't think that a human using a web browser is a robot.

I mean it is stupid but not in that way.