I saw close up the sea of endless junk that platform algorithms push in front of users, who then skim, skip, swipe, or scroll past without stopping to think deeply about much of any of it.If these trained and trusted human professionals are replaced at all, it is often by inscrutable black-box automation, as when MSN laid off its remaining journalists in 2020 in favor of proprietary AI.While staff reductions might save money in the short term, it comes at a heavy price downstream for users who find their information ecosystems increasingly polluted, and themselves dispirited by the sea of trash they have to swim through daily.We want to trigger a kind of “immune response” feeling in readers, so they will say: “Look how fake this is!” The AI content we create becomes like a puzzle people get to feel good about solving, which as we have seen is half the draw of conspiracy content in the first place.In most cases, the resulting systems are also likely to be closed proprietary tools built in service of for-profit companies, their investors, and governments – not all of whose interests will always be aligned with the average web user."