AI: The Middle Ages?

Maggie Appleton's essay on where the content of the web is going (or could go) is worth a read.

The upside of an extreme deluge of generic content that outpaces the current crop of bots is that human curation and the spaces there will be even more critical. As the article points out, current LLMs are generating average content (by design), which will make novelty and ingenuity stand out.

Admittedly, anything new will be immediately regurgitated and spat out faster than we see today. I hope this leads to further advances in culture, creativity, etc., not some hyper-techno Middle Ages.

By that, I mean a risk where the knowledge gained prior is forgotten or lost, turning progress back. The worst-case scenario is that the web becomes useless.