One tragedy of this is that I stop reading when things don't make sense. There are a few connections in the article that seem tenuous. In the past I might have thought through it, considered the situation, and realized that the author had a different perspective and, if I shifted my mindset, there was a real insight there.

Now I just assume that it's AI-slop and there's no other "way of thinking" that I can adopt to make it sensible. I'm surely missing out on learning through some human-written articles, but the volume of slop means that I can't spend all my time digging through nonsense in the hope that there's a gem of insight.

In your second paragraph, that was true before AI-slop, at least for me. There was enough human slop that I couldn't bother to spend my time digging through it in the hope of finding a gem.

AI makes it worse, of course, because the ratio of slop to non-slop is worse.