In fact, while reading that comment I started to wonder why no one has tried to use GPT to generate text one character at a time. Or if someone has, what are the advantages and disadvantages over the BPE approach.
The quality of writing was very high, so I was convinced I was reading something put together by a human with agency... except it didn’t pass my gut-feeling “how IT works”. It made me suspect that either the algorithm (the described one, not the AI responsible) was off, or that I just didn’t understand AI any more. As I know I don’t have up to date AI knowledge, the algorithm appeared more believable. I hiked deep down the uncanny valley with that one.
Edit: it is amusing to think that soon the way to distinguish them will be that human comments have weird errors caused by smartphone keyboard "spell checking" in them...
Still, would be an interesting experiment. Gwern swears it would improve stuff, so worth trying and comparing, I guess