I believe most publishers are still using human writers although the are obviously all getting their ideas from the same source. It's hard to find any 'lifestyle' content that doesn't have 100 or so similar versions.

Around 15 years ago I employed an journalist to write unique articles for a wedding site project - it was all copied by bigger sites who easily outranked us. A lot f this content was 'ever-green' and is still around to this day.

I learned not to spend so much money on content after this point. I guess most other people did too - hence the general lack of quality.

Ironically, these sites are now complaining about regurgitated AI content. I find it hard to sympathise.

Are you talking about replacing the writer with AI or using it as a kind of sub-editor? If the former, isn't LLM generated material chock full of repeating patterns and phrases? That's how it looks to me, anyway.