alt Hacker News> You are asking many readers to do substantial amount of work for something nobody potentially put any effort into. This is the fundamental imbalance. Much like answering unknown numbers, reading articles from new sources has become a time wasting trap.
But AI is only the latest continuation of what you're describing. The internet has been full of slop (clickbait, SEO-bait, etc.) and propaganda/disinformation for many years before AI was even a thing. Social media gave every person on the planet with a heartbeat and internet connection a publishing platform over a decade ago.
The only realistic approach for dealing with this is to exercise critical thought when you consume content. And if the massive volume of content we're flooded with is problematic, narrow the sources from which you consume content and consume less of it. Get off social media. Disavow YouTube. Don't doom scroll the news. And so on.
I don't see this article as inconsistent with exercising critical thought. In a sense, this policy the author is describing is itself an exercise of critical thought. And it's one way of narrowing the sources from which they consume content. Exercising critical thought involves noticing patterns and developing heuristics and rubrics to judge things. That's entirely compatible with what the article describes.