I think it's even more pernicious than the paper describes as cultural outputs, art, and writing aren't done to solve a problem, they're expressions that don't have a pure utility purpose. There's no "final form" for these things, and they change constantly, like language.

All of these AI outputs are both polluting the commons where they pulled all their training data AND are alienating the creators of these cultural outputs via displacement of labor and payment, which means that general purpose models are starting to run out of contemporary, low-cost training data.

So either training data is going to get more expensive because you're going to have to pay creators, or these models will slowly drift away from the contemporary cultural reality.

We'll see where it all lands, but it seems clear that this is a circular problem with a time delay, and we're just waiting to see what the downstream effect will be.