At that time, nobody believed a dead internet was technically feasible. Maybe this is hard to remember now.
The "danger" was in terms of spam / misinformation proliferation, not the same category of capabilities adjacent risks current discussed.
You can hold your own opinions on spam/misinformation as a problem, but to say there was no credibly anticipated outsized downside to a sudden jump in human-passing text generation feels pretty off to me.
I remember the arguments back then. Those alarmists were wrong. Nothing happened or could've happened just because you could generate drunken ramblings.
It's the kind of people that want to ban anything because of some theoretical small harm is technically possible. We're lucky it's not more prevalent or we'd still be in the stone age.
It's amazing to me that people actually thought GPT2 produced "human-passing" text, while I'm still tripping over obvious LLMisms in the output of recent models on a daily basis.
(It's also amazing to me that it took mere minutes for this observation, deep in a sub-thread, to get downvoted without any reply, with no obvious reason for it.)
The "danger" was in terms of spam / misinformation proliferation, not the same category of capabilities adjacent risks current discussed.
You can hold your own opinions on spam/misinformation as a problem, but to say there was no credibly anticipated outsized downside to a sudden jump in human-passing text generation feels pretty off to me.