Hi there @CotswoldQueen . Thanks for getting in touch. We've just deleted the thread you refer to, as you have spotted - and no, it was nothing to do with us! We're not in the business of starting threads ourselves and definitely not with any AI-nefarious purpose.
We know that some of our users are a little suspicious of AI, understandably given we're being told it's going to turn on us all and eat us one day, and therefore are naturally suspicious when they see posts that they think might be written by AI. It's something that's come up a few times on Site Stuff threads.
Just to clarify, with threads like the one you mention where someone is clearly using AI to their own ends, we'll delete those. (We should add that we have absolutely no firm evidence that this was the case with that particular OP. They seemed to want to have their thread deleted quite desperately, which doesn't really track with their claim to be using it to train AI, and it's entirely possible this claim was simply made to encourage us to delete it. We'll never know for sure...)
However, with threads or posts where it's clear someone has used AI to help them draft a post but the poster is essentially 'genuine' (ie they just want a bit of help with putting a post together) we're ok with that. AI is being used widely in the workplace and for everyday tasks so we see no reason to disallow it.
As always, if you see anything that you're worried about just hit the report button and we're usually able to sort the wheat from the chaff. Or the robots from the real posters. We don't generally see much of the former type of post but we would always delete posts that did not seem to be here on a genuine ticket.
It should also be said, however, that much as some of us might mistrust, AI, we would never encourage anyone to make important decisions on subjects such as health or finance based on the say so of people on the internet and we do carry warnings about that on those sorts of forums. As we always say, we can never know with 100% certainty that anyone posting on the site is who they say they are so it's always best to exercise caution.