Its important to remind that as you know some of these news outlets already had to transition from physical to digital media and this transition was entirely driven the 2000's Google monopoly on the internet. Everything was about search traffic and SEO.

Things changed a bit when social media started to drive traffic on their own taking some of that share from Google search but only the platform changed, not the methods.

In the age of competing both for SEO and for social media engagement, real "journalism" i.e actual humans to write reasonably accurate 500-1000 word articles to drive traffic are not important anymore. IMO the authority website model google created is long dead or irrelevant, these giant websites will never leave the #1 spot anymore anyway so the only competition is among those that can afford to pay for adsense(literaly why google pushes top paid results over actual search for some time now, they're desperate).

Old black hat SEO tools have existed right alongside Google since 2006. This AI paradigm then is just another step along these black hat tools, now not deemed black hat anymore and openly embraced.

When google became "the internet" the enshitiffication future was sealed. AI is just another tool from this long process not at all new though I guess people are also more aware now that this hit the mainstream. yet people forget the industry was using bots to spin fake articles almost 20 years ago already.

When I started sort of paying attention to some of these mainstream "news" sources since the Ukraine war, I immidiately noticed so much of it is rage bait shit or just sometimes literaly copy pasting between multiple sites, beyond the AP nonsense, narratives are sometimes repeated almost verbatim between WSJ/BI/NYT etc. The end result really is, do you need to pay someone to copy paste narratives when the AI can sort of do it well enough anyway?

I'll tell you this, if the year was 2008 these AI tools would be banned by Google and you'd be heavily penalized, heck perhaps naively I even believe they would change their algo specificaly to counter this as they did many times in the past to sort of "fight" the low hanging fruit black hat SEO of 10-15 years ago.

Alas not only they lost that battle but they openly embrace it now that even Google themselves acknowledge the dead internet theory is something to consider and the only thing that realy matters is making money. As a consequence, if even the monopoly owners don't care anymore then this is the result, every webpage will be some form of AI/bot content.