PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory (2025)

We reached out to Greg Bernhardt asking for comment on LLM usage in PhysicsForums, and he replied:

We have many AI tests in the works to add value to the community. I sent out a 2024 feedback form to members a few weeks ago and many members don’t want AI features. We’ll either work with members to dramatically improve them or end up removing them. We experimented with AI answers from test accounts last year but they were not meeting quality standards. If you find any test accounts we missed, please let me know. My documentation was not the best.

And in response to a follow-up question about the community feedback, he replied:

Mathwonk originally raised the issue of quality. I worked with him to improve them using a newer model, but it’s still not good enough.

The backdated answers were an internal test. We conceived of a bot that would provide a quality answer to a thread without a reply after 1+ years. That too also failed. Instead, I’m considering pruning all threads without a reply as they clutter up the forums.

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.

It also ties directly to an unstated but very real expectation: my identity in an online community is mine. I have accounts on forums that are older than some friendships. I have written tens of thousands of words under various identities. Just because they are relatively anonymous doesn’t make them less real to me, it doesn’t diminish the effort and time I put into the work done under those identities. Hijacking accounts, filling it with content their original owners did not write? That dilutes their efforts, and muddles their identities. The content was produced with the idea that it was mine in some capacity, inextricably tied to an identity I owned.

There’s also a social contract: when we create an account in an online community, we do it with the expectation that people we are going to interact with are primarily people. Oh, there will be shills, and bots, and advertisers, but the agreement between the users and the community provider is that they are going to try to defend us from that, and that in exchange we will provide our engagement and content. This is why the recent experiments from Meta with AI generated users are both ridiculous and sickening. When you might be interacting with something masquerading as a human, providing at best, tepid garbage, the value of human interaction via the internet is lost.

Beyond that, the idea of populating existing accounts with LLM-generated content is destructive. Like paving over an arboretum to make room for a generic strip mall. Internet archaeology is already a difficult and fraught business. It’s so difficult to find lost content, servers that have gone down, websites that are just gone… and now, apparently a lot of backdated data that is AI generated. This is not to say websites shouldn’t evolve and stay current, but this is different, this is a re-writing of history, and rewrites history for no clear gain.

It probably feels odd to see us write thousands of words fighting for the integrity of a community neither of us is part of, a tiny speck on the Internet trying desperately to survive, an enclave of a different era that is trying to hold on at all costs. But we are sympathetic. Running a website, especially a forum, is expensive. Server costs go up. Databases stop working and now you need to pay an expert or spend hours of unpaid time working on it. Bots flood in. DDOS attacks happen. Another wave of crypto-scams shows up. Staying alive on the internet costs money, and money comes through users and ads. You need those clicks like a man in the desert needs water, and every week it gets more competitive.

One must transform to survive. That axiom is a truth on the internet. If you don’t, you rapidly find yourself buried on the eighth page of Google results, with no users and no money to keep the servers up. But when communities compromise their morals and the core of their identity to stay afloat, and destroy the very bedrock of their commitment to their users and to some degree to the broader idea of the Internet, we have to wonder… was it worth it?