And also agreed: many trumpet the merits of "unassisted" human output. However, they're suffering from ancestor veneration: human writing has always been a vast mine of worthless rock (slop) with a few gems of high-IQ analysis hidden here and there.

For instance, upon the invention of the printing press, it was immediately and predominantly used for promulgating religious tracts.

And even when you got to Newton, who created for us some valuable gems, much of his output was nevertheless deranged and worthless. [1]

It follows that, whether we're a human or an LLM, if we achieve factual grounding and the capacity to reason, we achieve it despite the bulk of the information we ingest. Filtering out sludge is part of the required skillset for intellectual growth, and LLM slop qualitatively changes nothing.

[1] https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/diplomatic/THE...