the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the AI chucklefucks are using some manner of malware to route their traffic through botnets these days

Not a conspiracy at all: it’s a whole industry called “resnet proxies” that considerably predates LLMs.

There’s a whole good, bad, and ugly to it; they’re invaluable as a privacy and public-access tool, but also great for blackhats and ticket scalpers. Similarly, the proxy nodes come from a full spectrum of sources ranging from normies getting paid kickbacks to plug a box into their router, to pseudo-ISPs serving ghost clients, to malware farms, and everything in between.