but I'm somewhat horrified to think that I'm reading a novel or opinion piece generated by algorithms.

Many people already enjoy procedurally generated novels. Granted, it's not all there yet, but the idea is neat. Most story tropes are formulaic, which makes it easy to generate an outline. Depending on the subject you want either technical or flowery language. Or perhaps plain. All of these are fairly standard stuff.

The hard part is to introduce new ideas. Which, at the moment, is only possible by a human. The cool thing about computer written stories (or articles) is that they can be generated on the fly, and have user interaction.

Certainly a human writer could do this, but not for thousands of readers. And not nearly as quickly.

I hang up on robocalls

I hang up on human calls who read scripts as well. Hell, most of the time I prefer to deal with a computer, because they act in a predictable way.

I delete robot-generated spam (which is most likely all spam)

Nope. A lot of 'spam' is written by humans as well.

I want to know that a human consciousness, a sentient being, has written a personal essay or editorial.

How are you certain that I'm a 'human consciousness or a sentient being'? What if your the only sentient being and we are all philosophical zombies? Would that influence the way you interact with people? What happens when we get to the singularity and migrate our brains over to computers? Will you discriminate against transhumans?

How do you accurately distinguish whether something has a consciousness? Are you going to discriminate simply because someone acts in a more standardized (rather than a chaotic/'human') way?

The possibility that everything I read has no human author creates distrust between me and texts --

If anything, it gives me more trust. A computer only does what it's told (so far). It has no ill-intent unless the creator gave it one. While a human is almost certainly out for their own benefit.

Because a computer came up with the answer, it made no sense to the humans. Maybe there's no connection.

While '42' was meant to be a hilarious example, I think that the idea has merit. I'd personally say '3' is the answer, not 42. But as far as a computer determining the 'answer to life', that's kind of silly. It'd most likely just ask you to clarify. What answer are you looking for? The non-sensical answer was in response to the non-sensical question. Much like if you try to google 'not elephants' you'll almost certainly get elephants.

Barthes says we should judge a text on its own merits regardless of how it was authored

I would agree. In fact, I'd agree that's the point of language: to communicate ideas and to obtain information and other perspectives. In which case the author/speaker has no effect on the reception of the words.

We become engaged because we somehow trust that it has a message for us.

I don't. I don't trust anything that doesn't come from my own mind. When I began responding to this comment (like I do all comments), I set out to respond with my thoughts. I don't care whether there's an overarching message or idea behind your comment. Only that it is there to comment on and that each sentence and the body as a whole interests me. You could be a computer, a human, a dog, a cat, etc. It doesn't matter.

To those who want messages from robots, that's fine. Robots might well have something to say.

Well it depends on your goal and what you are looking for. Sports facts and news aggregation? I have that automated and sorted automatically. Both reddit and hubski do that fantastically. And hell, not even all the posts are user submitted, some are by 'bots'.

As far as robots having something to say, I'd say they most likely will, once we reach a certain point. But right now? They are just pieces of code that are ran.

But you could easily say the same about humans. Humans work off biological scripts. Just complex ones.

Finally, I'd like to leave off with a clip about conversations. It's part of one of my favorite shows, and brings up a good point.

And I'd like to point you over to a fantastic series (which has been merged into a movie) called "Time of Eve" which covers the robots/humans dynamic. It takes place in the future where robots have become indistinguishable (visually and mentally) from humans. But robots are still 'slaves' seeing as that's how technology is now. To distinguish, the robots are forced to have a ring above their head, to signify their place (you could almost relate this to skin color back in the slavery days). However, in the show, there's a certain cafe in which the rule is to not discriminate between robots and humans. And as such, the robots turn off their ring. The result is that you can't distinguish between the two groups, besides some 'obvious' cases (humans talking about robots like others, some robots have some faulty parts, there's a robot that clearly looks like a robot, etc).

It's a fascinating watch, and really covers this kind of topic brought to an extreme. Would you be uncomfortable treating a robot as an equal? Why or why not? What is it that humans have that an indistinguishable robot doesn't? It quickly turns into 'Well humans are humans, and robots... aren't' discrimination.