You act as if the internet was like a high society book club - all the previous articles were written by ivy league grads.

I recall geocities, angelfire, all the chans.

The internet has always been a cesspool with little islands of quality floating in a proverbial sewage of human output. In theory AI slop will improve.

A racist, sexist, ignorant online community of humans 20 years ago, if it is still active, is almost certainly still a racist, sexist, and ignorant community today.

Honestly, I'm not good enough at distinguishing between AI and human-written content to know. I don't want to read 'bad writing' for sure, but that's rules out a lot more than AI. I also believe that the human (hopefully) reading and accepting the output of AI before putting it on the internet is more responsible for 'AI slop' more than the AI is, because the human-side author should be checking what they publish, so I don't really need to know. If I read someone's post and don't like it I won't go back to their blog again. If I read it and I do like it, I will go back. Whether or not they're using AI is essentially irrelevant to me.

Fortunately for us all HN does that curation for us. High quality blog posts from well-written and interesting blogs like simonw's posts get posted here a lot. I can't tell if he uses AI to help write them but given his deep work on AI topics I'd be surprised if he doesn't.

Plus, I strongly suspect that AI content is improving at a pace that means most people won't be able to tell in a few years, especially once tools to easily fine tune a model on a corpus of your own text are simple to use.