Pre Google internet problem was not about the quality but about spam in headers and keywords, which were used by the pre-google search engines.

Google came and worked wonderfully for a year or two, until people learned to game page rank algorithm. Soon first google pages were just SEO spam and now half of the google is just spam, big corp websites, etc.

All of that precious stuff from small hobby websites about cool things to blogs that used to be wonderful read like https://www.joelonsoftware.com.

AI were not hurt that much by spam, I guess there were at least some curation done, the question is if this curation will work and for how long. It seems we are throwing the towel here as in case of search.