> I don't think ChatGPT and other things are going to make that much of a difference since people have been plagiarizing and republishing crap content for ages.

I'm afraid you're being too optimistic here. True, the internet has been full of rehashed, google-bait "content", in fact there have been lamentations recently that search engines have became useless because of these (because most of the hits on the first (few) page(s) point to such less than useless "articles").

What ChatGPT et al. change is that they make creating such content almost effortlessly easy.

An illustrative recent anecdote from an adjacent field: Clarkesworld, a reputable science-fiction magazine, had to suspend evaluating submissions completely for a while, because they were overwhelmed by the sudden influx of bad AI submissions.