The platforms are not neutral

Cheap production explains why the junk exists. It does not explain why it reaches you.

Something has to carry it. Between the person generating a thousand articles and the person reading one, there is a platform deciding what to show, and that decision has a rule behind it.

The rule, almost everywhere, is engagement. Show people what holds attention, because attention is the product being sold. This predates the technology in this journey by two decades, and it was not built with generated content in mind.

Now watch the two halves meet.

The people flooding the channel are not paid for being right. They are paid for being clicked, which means their target is exactly the thing the ranking measures. And unlike a person, they can try two thousand variations by Thursday and keep whichever ones the numbers liked.

So generated content is aimed, precisely, at the same quantity the platform ranks by. It performs. Performing means it spreads. Spreading means it pays. Paying means more of it gets made.

That is a loop, and it closes without anyone in it intending the result.

This is worth being careful about, because it is easy to reach for a villain here and the villain is not necessary. Nobody at these companies needs to want a degraded feed. The person generating the articles wants a living. The ranking system is doing what it was built to do, using a signal it has always used. Each participant is being rational, and the aggregate is a channel filling with whatever is cheapest to make and easiest to click.

Systems built for a world where making things was expensive behave strangely once that stops being true. Ranking by engagement was a reasonable stand-in for quality back when producing anything at all took effort. It measured something real. It stopped measuring that thing when the effort went away, and the rule stayed.