I am relatively young (32) and I feel the same way, as an avid fiction reader, and consumer of movies/tv; I don't think this observation is merely a symptom of getting old.
I suspect it has something to do with a few factors (just speculation):
1. Publishers / writers taking the safe route to content creation: using formulaic storytelling to generate "likely" successes (the pop music effect). They're treating writing more as a product than art.
2. Creative writing as a medium no longer attracts the best and brightest, who instead go into other expressive forms that are more on trend / current (movies, tv, video games, digital art, music, programming, etc).
3. People's attention spans are shorter, and novelty is not perceived as being rewarded (this is related to the first point)
4. A culture that is increasingly trending toward narcissism due to the effects of social media, pop culture, and more broken homes. People aren't writing for the sake of expression or art so much as to get attention and win prizes.
5. (Ties in with 1 and 3) An increasingly garbage information landscape full of click-bait and vapid content optimized for algorithms and views. This information landscape creeps into the culture at every level, I believe (to varying degrees)
It is ironic, and a poignant observation, that AI writing is nearly indistinguishable from much of the existing user-written content. I tend to agree, and blame that on the fact that in the past ten years, people have become intellectually lazy (perhaps for the above reasons?) and are really just parrots and synthesizers themselves.
I suspect it has something to do with a few factors (just speculation):
1. Publishers / writers taking the safe route to content creation: using formulaic storytelling to generate "likely" successes (the pop music effect). They're treating writing more as a product than art.
2. Creative writing as a medium no longer attracts the best and brightest, who instead go into other expressive forms that are more on trend / current (movies, tv, video games, digital art, music, programming, etc).
3. People's attention spans are shorter, and novelty is not perceived as being rewarded (this is related to the first point)
4. A culture that is increasingly trending toward narcissism due to the effects of social media, pop culture, and more broken homes. People aren't writing for the sake of expression or art so much as to get attention and win prizes.
5. (Ties in with 1 and 3) An increasingly garbage information landscape full of click-bait and vapid content optimized for algorithms and views. This information landscape creeps into the culture at every level, I believe (to varying degrees)
It is ironic, and a poignant observation, that AI writing is nearly indistinguishable from much of the existing user-written content. I tend to agree, and blame that on the fact that in the past ten years, people have become intellectually lazy (perhaps for the above reasons?) and are really just parrots and synthesizers themselves.