I would describe ChatGPT as a "generator." It generates content. Have you tried to look up a recipe on contemporary search engines at any point in the last several years? If so, you probably had to scroll through a longform essay's worth of filler text in order to reach the information you actually wanted. Traditional recipes are too short and useful to generate much ad revenue, so it's actually the filler text that makes money whenever anyone visits the page. That's content. Long before generators are ever used to make "art," they will be used to make digital obstacle courses that exist for no other purpose than to trap you in a vulnerable position where your time can be converted into income for digital landlords.
emphasis mine. Great piece on the frustrating, awful landscape that ML tools are now creating for us, and something that I truly believe should be resisted at all costs.
There's no real way for ML material to truly "replace" original material -- it'd be like saying you could replace all your meals with gray sludge (yes, I know this is somewhat the goal of products like Huel (no hate to the Huelers)) -- but there is a genuine danger of those with power who see this as, essentially, free labor to create "good enough" material.
That is the true danger, the siren song of free labor, the ultimate goal of a capitalist entity at the end of the day. It'll have diminishing returns, as does anything that is not original, and probably eventually collapse for one reason or another (my bet: something about licensing, something about server costs), but I can say that right now there is nothing more vile to me than the casual appreciation of these tools as """artistic""" """breakthroughs""". They're linguistic models that can generate fuzzy jpegs.