Aha, nicely put! I really like "superficial intelligence" ...

And I was just thinking the other day about how relevant are the concepts of negative externalities -- and spoilings of the commons -- to AI-generated prose. I was thinking of Evgeny Morozov's work, about ten years ago, when he was pondering the harms generated by individuals giving up so much of their private data to social networks and online services. He accurately noted that individuals rarely felt or experienced serious individual harms from having so much of their private info in corporate hands. The problems, he realized, were more collective and accumulative -- more similar, he noted, to the way our individual uses of motor cars and electricity contributed to global warming.

So I was thinking that that was an interesting way to consider the problems of AI-created text. The harms are less at the level of any individual AI utterance than in a more general despoiling of the very idea of utterances.

When you said "how plastic pollutes the oceans" , this is in the same direction of what I'm thinking ...