[timgilbert]

I'm honestly not trolling with this question, but can you explain what the practical applications of text generation are? From what I've seen of GPT-2, it's a cool toy, but I have never seen it create anything that seems like it would be useful to solve a problem (eg, a human-computer interaction problem).

The only applications I can think of for text generation are malevolent ones: I'm sure it would be great at generating spam sites which can fool Google's PageRank algorithms, and it seems like you could easily use it in an information warfare / astroturf setting where you could generate the illusion of consensus by arming a lot of bots with short, somewhat convincing opinions about a certain topic.

Is there something obvious I'm missing? It seems too imprecise to actually deliver meaningful information to an end-user, so I'm frankly baffled as to what its purpose is.