Oh yeah, no - that would make no sense at all. All these submissions are just going to be noise, junk that someone will have to sort through, on some level. The immediate impact, before it gets to that point with writing, is that editors will (as in this particular case) simply shut down open submissions, but in other realms, where someone can’t just do that, we’ll see the torrents of automated nonsense that will need to be sorted. (Because we’re not just talking about stories and articles, but everything that involves text - email scams and grant applications and survey response and…)
For outlets like CNET, where they just want to repackage a given set of facts with some filler in an intelligible form, that works for them. (And they’re functionally gatekeepers of the facts they’re packaging, so can act as a fact-packaging service.) There’s a lot of people who have been employed generating intelligible text of no particular value up until now, and they’re rapidly being replaced. (e.g. SEO content people)
But I think, for fiction, the nature of these algorithms means they will never really replace human beings* - improved software will make the output more intelligible, but not actually better. You’ll see AI-generated text in interactive media, but even that will be somewhat limited after the novelty factor wears off. (E.g. talking to what is effectively a background character in a video game, who has nothing important to convey to the player, but can respond well enough to seem more real than if they just had a couple canned responses.) I suspect there, you’ll see AI text being used in places where previously a writer largely wouldn’t have been used in the first place. Maybe I’m just being hopelessly optimistic here, though.
*Assuming no radically different - and more effective - approaches to AI. I mean, it could happen, but we’re getting into the territory of General AI here, so there’s no particular reason to think it will, at least any time soon. As long as it’s just a fancy text remixer, it’s not going to produce a story worth reading, except by accident.
