What you're saying is totally correct about AI slop polluting the web, but the reason they don't want to talk about it is because the second they frame "AI" as slightly better search, it invites all sorts of unfavorable financial comparisons. It also deflates the hype because now you're talking about a better version of a thing everyone is familiar with instead of some magical new buzzword like "agent" or "RAG" or whatever we're going to be talking about next year when agents don't work.

There was a period I remember fondly when the SEO slop was still mostly human generated because AI couldn't quite do it yet, and I was getting much better results from DDG than from Google. Now it's all despair-inducing.