Why the junk arrives first

Open almost anything now and some of it was generated. Product reviews that read like product reviews and describe nothing. Articles that answer a question by restating it four times. Music that sounds like music and goes nowhere. Books on sale that nobody wrote.

The usual explanation is that the technology is shallow, and this is what shallow technology produces.

That explanation is wrong, and the real one is more useful.

Go back to what generation costs. Training a frontier model is enormously expensive, once. Running the trained model is cheap, and it stays cheap no matter how many times you run it. A model that took months and a data centre to train will write you a thousand articles for the price of a sandwich.

Now put that next to something older. Copying has been free since the internet existed. Making the thing was the expensive part; sending it anywhere was not.

So both costs are now near zero. The cost of making it, and the cost of distributing it.

Anything that is nearly free to produce and free to copy will be produced in enormous volume, and it will arrive before the careful thing does, because the careful thing takes a person a week.

That is the whole mechanism. Not a fact about what the machine can do. A fact about what happens to any medium when the price of filling it falls to nothing.

It has happened before, at smaller scale. Cheap printing brought pamphlets and it brought junk mail. Free email brought spam within a few years of arriving. Each time, the useful thing and the flood came through the same door, because the door was the drop in cost.

What is different here is the range. Spam could only ever be text that looked like a letter. This produces text, images, voices, video, and code, in any style, at a quality that clears the bar for a quick glance. And a quick glance is all most things get.