There are a lot of SO questions posted by very weak non-native speakers of English and some of these are hard to distinguish from those. Kind of scary!
What possible positive outcomes do you see for this kind of (admittedly inevitable) capability?
At some point this technology will extend into what's left of print, then talk radio, then TV. An endless supply of Markov punditry.
I hope that the good will outweigh the bad. I’d love to create an answer generator, for example.
Once enough questions are generated I’m going to try creating a classifier to see if a neural net can differentiate between real questions and fake ones.
> I am actually a bit worried that I’m already starting to see search engine traffic coming in...
We can discuss hypothetical systems that could maliciously flood us with generated content. The creator of this particular service which is being discussed here and now could also begin taking steps to ensure that his creation does not inadvertently create a problem for some hapless Google user.
>I wonder if our current discussion boards on the interwebs can survive the coming influx of content like this and the next generations of it that follow.
Yes the robots.txt is a good and trivial step he could take to ensure well behaved robots do not pick up his content. So your comment suggesting robots.txt is a good comment in its narrow frame, but one that missed the larger picture. That minor problem is solved. The interesting problem is of a different nature.
Brilliant, now you only need to come up with a way to use this for good and keep (at least slightly) ahead of the cost in the long run.