It was already on fire, AI just pointed a leafblower at the coals. Before slop farms started using ChatGPT, they were using outsourced writers who had a tenuou

It was already on fire, AI just pointed a leafblower at the coals. Before slop farms started using ChatGPT, they were using outsourced writers who had a tenuous (at best) grasp on the language and subject. If you searched anything on the web, your first page of search results was generally incredibly fluffy articles. For example, you would search for "How to use python async" or whatever, and every non-stackoverflow result would go something like "Python is a useful language for async library usage. Python is a language created in... You can install Python by... Synchronous programming is... Asynchronous programming is... Python synchronous code looks like... Python async module code looks like... Popular libraries for async are... Other languages have async such as... To import async module you can..." with every paragraph interspersed with an ad. The content was surface level, relying upon blatant plagiarism of better-written articles and forum posts without attribution. It was an utterly miserable experience if you placed any value on your time. The only thing that's changed is the quantity of slop, and the karmic irony that the content farmers who put the writing profession into a race-to-the-bottom were themselves discarded, in much the same way as the scabs who replaced striking workers were frequently discarded in the industrial era. And that's without even getting into the subject of the people who made money as Internet point farmers of Reddit or Twitter, who would repost generic content then sell their accounts to spammers. The Internet was already going in this direction; the only difference is the rate at which it enshittified. I agree that it's in a worse state than it was 10 years ago, but let's not look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.