Making people actually read content doesn't strike me as cruel. Tedious, sure, but not cruel. What is cruel is seeing all of our collective individuality and artistic expression jammed into an LLM, sold back to us by the token, and forced into our lives by an economy increasingly skewed towards holders of capital.

Fair point. Again, I might be terribly and almost Icarus-like optimistic, but I still believe the push and pull between Big Tech and Indie AI builders would still lead to an equilibrium that makes the world a little more efficient and perhaps in time, more creative than AI slop. Let's hope Open Source AI opens instead of OpenAI so the internet is not feeding the capitalist machine of OpenAI and Anthropic.