"Logically avoided?"

OpenAI has a machine that emits plausible text. They're trying to argue that "emitting plausible text" is the hard problem, and "modeling the natural world, human consciousness, society, etc." is the easy one.

Hmm, I don't see where they have suggested this, could you point to where this is? If they do argue for this, then I would also disagree with them.

Modelling those things is a separate problem to emitting plausible text and pursuing one is not necessarily beneficial to the other. It seems more sensible to pursue separate models for each of these tasks.