>>The best that we can do is mute the author and move on.

Exactly what I've been doing. I'd hope that Medium might make use of this, maybe adding a ""muted because..." box when a reader mutes - and "article written by AI" should be one of the choices - somewhat parallel to the 'report' option on articles. Or they could expand 'report' to include 'AI author' as an option.

Personally, I 'curate' medium; I 'follow' authors and pubs I find interesting (and yes, you're one of those) and then pretty much only use the 'following' tab instead of what the recommendation engine puts in the 'for you' tab.

Whitelisting is much easier than blacklisting. True for email, websites, and (IMO interestingly) kidneys (they toss everything, pull back what's good / wanted - sound like a white list to you?)