I dunno, not a huge fan of TL;DR (even though it definitely has its place for long-winded walls of text) -- I feel like TL;DR is a cause or a symptom or both of our dwindling attention spans. I think this inability to read anything longer than a tweet, and the resulting loss of nuance, has been pretty bad for discourse, online or off.
AI-writing is definitely very annoying to read, but I don't know if it's ideal to start dismissing interesting content before we even get to its substance just because we don't like its form.
but our dwindling attention spans are caused by a deluge of material sapping our energy before we can devote it to something worthwhile. developing a fast and frugal mental filter for insubstantial walls of slop is a new prerequisite for not being so exhausted that you default to saying tl;dr to the real, good stuff.
Kind of yeah, but I think more than just the deluge of material it is the nature of that material: even before AI slop, social media has inundated us with short-form content via their algorithmic firehose. Our attention span is dwindling because we have been trained to mentally switch off if we don't get a hook or a dopamine hit within the first few seconds, at which point we continue doomscrolling. (Indeed, studies suggest that attention spans in both kids and adults have reduced drastically in the last decade coinciding with the rise of social media.)
A quick mental filter is absolutely needed though. But we should consider tuning that filter for signals other than AI writing. I've built one up where a quick skim through the post tells me if there is any substance there or just some shallow "it's not A, it's B" punchline. It took some work to tune that filter, but has let me find some very interesting articles that I otherwise might not have read.
AI-writing is definitely very annoying to read, but I don't know if it's ideal to start dismissing interesting content before we even get to its substance just because we don't like its form.