It makes it cheaper, faster, and effectively infinitely scalable. You'll run out of man hours and people to generate this stuff by hand than you can launching a ton of resources in the cloud.

With the main concerns being troll army/fake news type stuff, I don't think this makes a difference. We seem pretty sure there are state level actors behind a lot of that stuff, and I think it would be silly to believe they can't recreate something at the level of GPT-2, especially with the underlying principles out there and understood, competitors like BERT available, etc.

I think their heart is in the right place, but also incredibly naive.