Really fascinating stuff.

I'm also interested in how the engineers who implemented this feature at Instagram felt. I might have been tempted to resign. It is just so stupid and dystopian.

But, honestly, I am not surprised. Stacker News is not representative of the population. In my interactions people, I notice that many of them do not have confidence in their ability to write meaningful or thoughtful things. They believe that the AI writes better than them, so they think that by having AI generate a comment or an email, that it will be of better quality than what they could write.

I think they are wrong, of course. I'd rather read a clumsy, genuine comment than a flowing, fake one. But still, many people really do think this way. Coupled with inherent laziness, and you can see why people would actually make use of this feature.