Is it too late to fix the problem of AI clutter on the web?

What's funny about it is that the situation was critical a long time ago. In

http://www.seobook.com/blog

you'll see the story of how Google went downhill annotated by many comments from my evil twin. People didn't have the sophistication of ChatGPT but we were already talking about the "dead internet" theory long before it. Spamming the web with huge amounts of mad lib, database and junk content was widespread in 2008, around 2011 people whose philosophy was

https://www.bluehatseo.com/seo-empire-part-1/

were mostly giving up and switching to scams involving paying for ads. Back then we were were writing PHP scripts (Eli, the guy who ran that blog got into so much trouble because he posted a neural network in PHP that could break CAPTCHAs.)

Google really let the search results go to hell and be insensitive to whatever you do to promote your page because they don't want you to invest in content (either quality or quantity) or link building (either quality or quantity) they just want you to buy the #1 spot and if you can't afford that the #2 spot and so on.