Who do you think wrote the news for the last 10 years? Because either journalists only need a pen to get a job and all have the same opinion or that garbage was written by AI.
LLMs are no more valuable to a large spam operation than they are to any other business. This is like a 5%-10% profit increase, not 50%-100%. The key to that game is finding suckers. Language models help, but only so much.
So it's unclear to me, at this moment, how much the automated spam threat will increase because of GPT-4 and friends. We've already had plenty of that before we had publicly available LLMs.
Anyway I'm not convinced yet of the coming chatpocalypse. I think I'll just wait this one out and not try to make any predictions when there's so little to go on.
Edit: I'm more worried about scammers, scamming, than spammers, spamming, to be honest. There are plenty of people that don't have a clear understanding of how difficult it is to tell that one is having a conversation with a bot over the internet these days. People were already falling for bride scams over the 'net for a long time before LLMs. A scammer could automate that. And probably increase their revenue to boot (because they can target more people now).
Bride scam: