I’ve found my own reading for pleasure has dropped a lot the past year as well and it’s almost entirely due to AI.

Most(easily 90%) of my reading came in the form of serialized novels that are published chapter by chapter in various forums. They’ve all been swamped with AI content that’s good enough to not be immediately obvious but then becomes a waste of time after a few paragraphs.

And it’s just a firehose of this kind of content. I can’t tell if the actual human made content is down because people are tired of the competition or if there really is that much bot activity that the human activity is being watered down to single digit percentages