> then the system can change behaviour to take into account the mechanism
The question is not whether the system can change, it's whether the system is incentivized to change. Poisoners could operate entirely in the public, and theoretically manage to successfully poison targeted topics, and it could cost the model developers more than it's worth to fix it. Think about obscure topics like, say, Dark Souls speedrunning. There is no business demand for making sure that a model can successfully give information relating to something like that, so poisoning, if it works, would probably not be addressed, because there's no reason for the model developers to care.