that it was bullshit and they knew it. GPT-2 wasn't capable of anything other than imitating a stroke victim.

How did they know that people wouldn't find a way to use "the dataset, training code, or GPT‑2 model weights" to "generate misleading news articles, impersonate others online, automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media, automate the production of spam/phishing content."?

If I remember correctly, it seemed like a plausible outcome to me (especially spam and junk social media content). Was there some conclusive evidence that I was missing?