> people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content.
This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance. So they regress to indirect markers of good writing, and the whole thing becomes a game of signaling.
The rot is so deep, many popular resources on writing focus more on style and presentation than focusing on the substance of writing. And even when best-intentioned, all this does is make poor writing a bit more palatable by giving it a veneer of polish.
This is generally the way it's always been. As evidence, observe the plethora of guides like Strunk & White for the entirety of the 20th century. This time period not only included the moon landing, but also the final decades of the third European Renaissance. You'd be hard-pressed to identify a time period that was jam-packed with brilliance.
Guides such as S&W focus entirely on style. Then we have the dearth of guides on composing a good sentence.
Of course, S&W is also filled with insanely stupid advice. "Don't split an infinitive" immediately comes to mind. Ask yourself which sounds more powerful, oh fellow geeks:
* To go boldly where no one has gone before
* To boldly go where no one has gone before
Split infinitive form is so much better. "Don't split an infinitive" is one more smooth-brained 19th century rule invented by Latin-obsessed weirdos who thought it was the perfect language, and that they should impose Romance grammar on Germanic languages. (See also "don't end a sentence with a preposition" and "don't start a sentence with a conjunction.")
I agree that post-COVID we have a glaring issue with the problem you highlight, but I don't think the focus on orthography is a symptom. Long ago, my dad criticized my résumé because I didn't put two sentences after periods despite me using a variable-spaced font. The man's nearly eighty. He's not exactly some 21st-century miseducation case.
One caveat I'll add at the end is that focusing on form isn't always bad. Form is one of the great joys of reading both poetry and prose. Word selection is often form rather than substance. The opening lines of Lolita are pure form. Nabokov could've easily just said "I'm a pedophile and Lolita is attractive to me." Instead, he chose words that have you overuse your tongue when you sub-vocalize, making the text feel uncomfortably erotic to a normal, non-pedo reader.
> This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance.
No, with AI it's because it's MUCH faster than evaluating substance, and fast ways to weed out AI slop are desparately needed, since it can be produced so quickly.
It's also infinitely more error-prone. All form-based heuristics are horrible for detecting AI because the one thing AI is damn near perfect at is writing like an actual human.
It's the thing it was trained to do. The entire decades-old architecture has exited for specifically that purpose. That second "L" in "LLM" is "language" for a reason.
Yes, but the desparate need is specifically for quick and easy ways to detect AI. If it's error-prone that's unfortunate, but better than nothing. A slow, laborious way, on the other hand, is useless because it doesn't achieve the goal of reducing the workload.