Because so many of these papers are getting marked every year someone might be able to get permission to mix in a few machine-generated responses, as an experiment. Or perhaps not, because it would perhaps be a bit embarrassing if the examiners gave good marks to GPT-generated crap.
Also, I have seen some research e.g. on telling whether things are the same or different in an image. Like draw two arbitrary shapes side by side and build a same / different classifier. Last I heard, it doesn't extrapolate to new shapes, i.e. it is not actually learning "sameness".
Youtube video recommender (maybe some other recommenders also like tiktok, fb, you know what I mean).
Outplaying human in Chess and in Go and who knows in what else.
Generating useless human-lime wordings via GPT-3 and recognizing voice commands for.
Some help for doctors like cancer recognizing and for chemical engineers like finding some new designer drugs.
Workplace supply for programmers who don't want to code.
Bothering humans with realistic voice bots (phone spam) and with private data analyzers (palantir).
Unoffableness as in cryptocurrencies (required for Skynet).
Your first example (FB/YT recommendations) is literally tearing our society to bits at the moment.