> Why should I spend more time reading something than the person spent writing it?

The labor theory of value doesn't work in economics and it also doesn't work in literary criticism. You should spend time reading something if reading it is valuable. You shouldn't if it isn't.

The trouble is it's impossible to magically know in advance if something is worth reading. You have to use secondary information to guess. Until recently "it appears that the author put effort into writing it" was a vaguely useful signal, but LLMs have ruined that.

Actually that's not even the only issue. Another reason people hate this is because it's inconsiderate - it's like people who leave voicemails or say "hi" in chat. They are not respecting my time.

Until recently, the only way to know whether the author put effort into writing the piece was to read it. Simply continue doing what you've always been doing.

That's simply not true. Before AI it took effort to write. Even rambly nonsense takes some effort, and even then rambly nonsense is usually obvious without having to read much.

AI changes things so that you can produce text that seem like it was written with care and effort very easily automatically. It requires significantly more effort from the reader to figure out that it is worthless.

It really is different.

> The trouble is it's impossible to magically know in advance if something is worth reading. You have to use secondary information to guess.

This was true in the past, and is still true now.

> Until recently "it appears that the author put effort into writing it" was a vaguely useful signal, but LLMs have ruined that.

This isn't true now and wasn't true in the past.