LLMs reduce the marginal cost per unit of content.

When snail mail had a cost floor of $0.25 for the price of postage, email was basically free. You might get 2-3 daily pieces of junk mail in your house’s mailbox, but you would get hundreds or thousands in your email inbox. Slop comes at scale. LLMs didn’t invent spam, but they are making it easier to create more variants of it, and possibly ones that convert better than procedurally generated pieces.

There’s a difference between your cognitive brain and your lizard brain. You can tell yourself that mantra, but still occasionally fall prey to spam content. The people who make spam have a financial incentive to abuse the heuristics/signals you use to determine the authenticity of a piece of content in the same way cheap knockoffs of Rolex watches, Cartier jewelry, or Chanel handbags have to make the knockoffs appear as authentic as possible.