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Well there's also the fact that GPT-3 API was released in June 2020 and its writing capabilities were essentially on par with ChatGPT initial release. It was just a bit harder to use, because it wasn't yet trained to follow instructions, it only worked as a very good "autocomplete" model, so prompting was a bit "different" and you couldn't do stuff like "rewrite this existing article in your own words" at all, but if you just wanted to write some bullshit SEO spam from scratch it was already as good as ChatGPT would be 2 years later.

Also the full release of GPT-2 in late 2019. While GPT-2 wasn't really "good" at writing, it was more than good enough to make SEO spam

I didn't remember that, but it would explain the spam exponential grow back then.

And 10 years ago, Reddit was already experimenting with auto-generated subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator.

It was popular way before 2020 but Google managed to keep up with SEO tricks for good decade+ before. Guess it got to breaking point.