And indeed, human got a good skill to skip ad blocks on pages.
Next will be any texts on web pages: why to bother reading stuff that AI throws on us?
But then I remembered that I had already stopped reading some common Google search results because they seemed too low effort for a very long time. And they often looked like they were generated, not written. Just three examples from different fields: Quora, CNN, and CNET. But the list is much longer. In non-English parts of the Internet, there is also poorly auto-translated content from websites like Stack Overflow, which is weirdly high in the Google results. Fortunately, I found extensions to block these websites in Google search. So for me, and I believe for many people, it has already happened.
On the other hand, I enjoy reading articles from Simon Willison and Adam Johnson. And even though now we have very powerful chatbot services that can explain anything to you or effectively teach you some skill, I will most likely continue to read the content that they put on their blogs or elsewhere.
Reputation did matter, and it will matter even more in the future. I believe people will continue to read other people's texts. At least I will.
Example: videos uploaded in the YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips have a high probability of being made by the Linus Tech Tips people and not just being completely AI generated, unless of course if that made the videos better, but I still think that the videos would be curated by the Linus Tech Tips team.
I, for one, would rather read an insightful piece by an author who has been helped by an AI than a soulless product of a content farm.
When do we get AI Hunter Thompson?
I closed the browser tab and haven't gone back since.
For example, the other day I asked it something about the Flask codebase, and it found the relevant part of the codebase immediately. When I asked it about the behavior of the code, it wasn't always correct, but it still showed me the relevant code so I could read it way faster than I would have found it myself.
Initially my impression of ChatGPT was the same as yours - I asked it some questions in a specialized domain I know well, and when it was wrong I decided ChatGPT is useless. But after enough people told me they find it useful, I took another look and tried finding more applications. And since then I've been impressed by what it can do.
Regarding certain medical conditions I've asked to list the studies and explain them, it does that pretty well.
But just as talking with a human, or with googling info on a website, or with Stackoverflow, Im always assuming I need to double check it.