> Something is deeply wrong with AI generated output, and I say this as someone who is typically very impressed by AI.

It is because GenAI output has no thought behind it, as you identified in your previous paragraph:

> And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable.

You are searching for meaning in something which was not created to convey meaning. The text was, instead, the result of an extremely clever statistically based algorithm.

Not contemplation. Not thought.