Unauthorized access into a computer system and “Piracy” are two very different things.

When sites put challenges like Anubis or other measures to authenticate that the viewer isn't a robot, and scrapers then employ measures to thwart that authentication (via spoofing or other means) I think that's a reasonable violation of the CFAA in spirit — especially since these mass scraping activities are getting attention for the damage they are causing to site operators (another factor in the CFAA, and one that would promote this to felony activity.)

The fact is these laws are already on the books, we may as well utilize them to shut down this objectively harmful activity AI scrapers are doing.

If I put a banner on my site that says "by visiting my site you agree not to modify the scripts or ads displayed on the site," does that make my visit with an ad blocker "unauthorized" under the CFAA?

How would you “authorize” a user to access assets served by your systems based on what they do with them after they've accessed them? That doesn’t logically follow so no, that would not make an ad blocker unauthorized under the CFAA. Especially because you’re not actually taking any steps to deny these people access either.

AI scrapers on the other hand are a type of users that you’re not authorizing to begin with, and if you’re using CloudFlares bot protection you’re putting into place a system to deny them access. To purposefully circumvent that access would be considered unauthorized.

Site owners currently do and should have the freedom to decide who is and is not allowed to access the data, and to decide for what purpose it gets used for. Idgaf if you think scraping is malicious or not, it is and should be illegal to violate clear and obvious barriers against them at the cost of the owners and unsanctioned profit of the scrapers off of the work of the site owners.

That doesn’t make any logical sense. You cant tie legal authorization to an unsaid implicit assumption, especially when that is in turn based on what you do with the content you’ve retrieved from a system after you’ve accessed and retrieved it.

When you access a system, are you authorized to do so, or aren’t you? If you are, that authorization can’t be retroactively revoked. If that were the case, you could be arrested for having used a computer at a job, once you’ve quit. Because even though you were authorized to use it and your corporate network while you worked there, now that you’ve quit and are no longer authorized that would apply retroactively back to when you DID work there.

There was no header on the request saying I want ads though

Carefull, this way even not looking at an ads positioned at the bottom of the page (or anyway not visible without scrolling) would mean to remove authorisation brought to you by ads.