PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory - Hall of Impossible Dreams

Some threads on PhysicsForums have ChatGPT generated answers from the past. The authors, David and Felipe, investigate how this was possible and why it was done. It seems the forum maintainer used accounts of old users to reply to threads with LLM generated responses. Was it consensual?

It’s hard to imagine that 110 existing users gave consent to be used as test accounts, for 115,000 posts, over four waves spanning almost a year. The idea that these are test accounts gone wrong, or a bot accidentally mislabeled, doesn’t seem to align with the facts.

Discovered via 82MHz.