Now that we have AI, writing doesn't signal proof of work like it used to. There's long been a genre of book that's really just a glorified business card. The authors would hand out these books, and people politely accepted them, and nobody expected a single page to be read. In exchange, those authors received steep speaking and consulting fees. I can't tell you how many writers have told me how their fees skyrocketed after they published their book. Most of them were hired simply because they published a book, and not necessarily because that book was any good. This game still exists, but everybody's a little more skeptical of it now because it's so much easier to hack the system.

A strange conundrum of the Internet is that people are tired of slop while all the algorithms are dealing people slop because it's precisely what they click on, so with each passing year, the Internet gets more and more overrun with the very things people say they don't want.