I suppose the question is is there an incentive to do that? A crappy sounding crappy quality spam recipe already gets a page hit and no goodwill. Does better sounding but still crappy do better in any way that translates to money for the author (or author's operator)?

It causes the site to be left on for longer, providing more room for ad exposure.

Not that long ago, the internet didn't even exist.

Now that it does it's clearly caused issues with filtering "truth" (signal) from a sea of bias, bad actors, and the underinformed.

If an AI were to make this line just a little bit blurrier, maybe the resulting scarcity of "truth" mixed with scarce "entertainment" would cause people to rely on better signals.

That is probably wishful thinking of course. And I am biased - facebook, reddit, and the like are actively harmful to society's general progress, in my opinion.

This is also my best case scenario, and I do think it's going to play out, but in a different way. Instead of relying on better signals, people are going to just generally disregard all signals. You can already see foreshadowing of what will happen in today's world. As the media has begun playing increasingly fast and loose with the truth, it's not like people just started trusting certain entities more - but rather trust in the entire media system collapsed.

As per a recent article [1], only 25% of Americas do not think the media is deliberately misleading them (50% do, 25% unsure). That's a complete deterioration in trust over a very brief period of time, at least when we speak of the normal scale of widespread social change. And, IMO, this will be a major step forward. Trust is too easily weaponized in a time where there's seemingly been a catastrophic collapse of ethics and morals among both political and business leaders.

[1] - https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-...