> It's unclear to me if the resulting product will be better or worse.
It will be worse. If you want endless streams of synthetic text from an AI, you can already get that, today. What you can't get is a conversation with a human who has first-hand experience... Except via forums like reddit.
Given how trivial it would be for me, an amateur AI tinkerer to make a reddit bot that nobody can tell from a human - with an agenda subversively hidden in contextual responses - I can't imagine that even reddit knows the full scale of its bot problem today.
With genAI on the rise it'll get harder and harder to spot real from fake.
It's unclear to me if the resulting product will be better or worse. But it will definitely be composed of more synthetic data than it is now.