I really want to believe this will be true. However, I also suspect there's some external driving force, that I cannot readily name, which is making people incapable of consuming anything except this low-effort content. I mean, obviously it's working to some extent. Perhaps AI will be the thing that accelerates its death, but part of me thinks something else needs to happen beyond just an increase in useless content.

It's the economy of everything being free but supported with advertising. That mechanic is what leads to the race to the bottom lowest common denominator human motivation hacking attention toxicity. (yes that's a bit of a ramble).

If people weren't getting paid for the smallest increment of attention they could grab, it wouldn't be promoted the way it is. I don't have a high opinion of the things which grab my attention, but they still manage to do it sometimes. I think many people are in that boat. If there were other mechanisms with which we rewarded people for doing things, something different would be optimized.

And people just wouldn't reward the 10-second-gratification in anywhere near the same way if it weren't for the advertising.

It's fine though. Low-effort people deserve low-effort content. Maybe the work of high-effort creators and the patrons that support their works will simply not be on the Internet in the future.

Now there's more pressure to have a stronger signal and hopefully rewards to match.