You don't remember the discussion around Narrative Science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_Science) then. They were a university spin-out that could write plausible-sounding baseball news articles (and later finance) from the stats. Their software enabled local news websites to publish articles about every game, which was seen as a boon to sports fans and a key driver for web traffic. There was a lot of criticism about how it wasn't 'real' though.
For as long as we've had computers people have tried to make them sound human. It's not a new thing that people are concerned about knowing if they're talking to (or reading) a robot imitating a person.
Slate published this about it in 2012: https://slate.com/technology/2012/03/narrative-science-robot...
For as long as we've had computers people have tried to make them sound human. It's not a new thing that people are concerned about knowing if they're talking to (or reading) a robot imitating a person.