Doctorow's point hits hard when you look at how content and web interfaces are being churned out right now. The web is flooded with low-friction, high-noise garbage. As someone building a content generation tool, the biggest technical challenge isn't making the AI write more; it's making it write less. We explicitly instruct our models to be 'High Signal, Low Noise,' force short sentences, and ban vague platitudes. If a tool just generates walls of text to appease algorithms (or fill up modal dialogs), it's just contributing to the decay. Short, punchy, and grounded is the only way forward.

doctorow's basically saying ai in journalism isn't about innovation it's just the latest way for media execs to tell their audience and their workers to go fuck themselves while they stripmine whatever's left of the industry for ad revenue