Just purely organic YouTube Comments circa early '20s alone surely outslop any "AI" by a giant margin.
Everyone sees the markers, and it's a hot topic. There are maybe a thousand from-scratch trained models, and just few mainstream ones produce most of human-targeted content. In today's world, no surprise everyone knows the common patterns of those. That sloppy landscape is not just load-bearing em-dashes — it's a humble testament to their reinforcement learning.
Humans produce tons of texts, with all sorts of nonsense in it, without thinking it through. Our slop is just a lot more diverse. And mostly just spoken out loud.
> P.S. Information search and retrieval if the best and most direct way to use LLMs.
Yes, but not directly, if they don't know something they tend to hallucinate like mad, even today. YMMV, but in my experience they work best as actual "cheap" reasoning for building queries and checking out search engine results. Even if they misinterpret some result, more and more results will still steer it towards correct conclusions and it can point at some results that relate well enough to be useful.
I agree with your last statement.