> Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?

This is an easy but not very insightful framing.

I want to read intelligent, thoughtful text that is useful in some way: to me, to society, to humanity. Ceteris paribus, the source of the information does not necessarily matter; it only matters as a matter of association. To put it another way, “human” vs “machine” is not the core driving factor for me.

All other things equal, I would rather read A over B:

A. high quality AI content, even if it is “only” the result of 6 minutes of human question framing and light editing [1]

B. low quality purely human content, even if it was the result of 60 minutes of effort.

There is increasingly less ability to distinguish “human” writing from “AI” writing. Some people fool themselves on their AI-detection prowess.

To be direct: I want meaningful and satisfying lives for humans. If we want to reward humans for writing more, we better reflect on why, and if we still really want that, we better find ways that work. I don’t think “buy local” as a PR campaign will be easily transferred to a “read human” movement.

[1]: Of course AI training data is drawn from humans, so I do not discount the human factor. My point is that quantifying the effort put into it is not simple.