"As a news source, this is fine. In fact, I would welcome it. "Hive News"would be a great account, with AI generated news stories from around the world."
This has already been attempted and was flagged to dust here years ago.
"is it worth destroying a strong reputation by pushing AI written content in an effort to scalp some rewards? For most who spent a lot of time nurturing these relationships, it is not."
I am aware of users here with in excess of ~10k accounts. Reputation farming has long been a thing on Hive. In fact reputation is a personal assessment, and should be bespoke. The reputation score is merely the recommendation of AI (an algorithm) already, and cannot solve the problem. A mechanism whereby users can assign to other accounts their personal assessment would create at least the potential to enable users to use reputation reliably as a guide to curation. The current reputation score is gamable by AI and has long been abused on Hive.
"Perhaps the Internet will end up filled with mostly bot generated content..."
[insert 'The future is now, old man' meme here]
As long as the curation of content is afflicted with monetization, the problem will remain insoluble on Hive, as I have long asserted. Curation rewards pervert curation and replace the incentive to curate quality content with incentive to attain ROI through voting. This is why forward looking users have been accumulating accounts as mentioned above.
Thanks!