I think the reason why AI-generated content is garbage is because the people who use AI to create them have no general skills in content-creation and also bad taste. I know what's good content and what's bad content so I can work with an AI to rapidly iterate and remove all the bad parts it generates.

But most people who one-shot content barely bother to read it, let alone edit or polish. And that's why it stinks. I doubt that better AI agents will solve this. Writing powerful content is actually a pretty hard and subjective task; writing boilerplate marketing copy is very easy and mostly objective.

If the idea is that people who don't understand content will use it to generate content, then its logical to conclude they don't understand why their content stinks as well and will continue to publish the said content.

I feel almost 100% of content published (even on high-tier publications like The Guardian) have AI involved in creating them but their strong editorial processes prevent shit like "It's not LIKE THIS BUT LIKE THIS!" type text to be present 100 times in a 500 word article.

People need to understand writing is a skill and an art. AI can emulate it but so far, no model seem to have genuine creativity or skill in their writing unless you wrestle with it (but at that point it is YOUR skill that you're using to make the AI better).