I remember back in my childhood reading all kinds of stuff about vampires, aliens and what not in articles starting pretty seriously found through search engines. So the skills to resist human or machine text generators are there, everybody had to develop those.

It’s just that the new (after 2005 or so) majority in the Web considered those skills and many others irrelevant and useless, just like the people and the culture associated with them.

It took a new kind of the same threat to make them take it seriously.

And it was in some way amazing to read something weird created by a human brain. Just like music, it has some kind of “movement”, “direction”, “structure”. “AI”-generated things in comparison to those old texts are like Ludovico Einaudi, no offense to that guy, compared to Vaughan-Williams.