A commitment to amend and move forward

I can't say I'm very impressed with an apology after the fact, after apparently being caught.
While I can appreciate the transparency, I can't look past the fact that you should've known better than to do this in the first place. I mean, 1850 (now deleted) posts, of which about 1200 were (partially) AI-generated? That's a lot of flouting the rules, and consistently so over a long time span...

I've seen users get suspended for posting AI-generated content. Having your answers deleted isn't "punishment". That's just standard cleanup.

I mean, I really don't get comments like "You're proving once again that you're a great person." How does this make anyone a great person? It's abuse of the site on a significant scale, which got caught, resulting in an apology after the fact... That's damage control.

A "great person" wouldn't have flouted the rules to start with.

So, where am I going with this?

• I'm not seeing any genuine remorse.
  It's a political apology. "I've been bad", "I'm sorry I've been bad", immediately followed by an excuse: "My intentions were to contribute helpful information".

• There's no reason provided as to why OP knowingly flouted the rules (on a significant scale).

• The only apparent "punishment" has been the deletion of the answers.
  That's just standard cleanup. Are we making an exception because OP's a high-rep, high-contributing user?

• It took way too much effort to get a straight answer from anyone stating, "yes, he's been suspended for 7 days."
  I get that suspension reasons are privacy-sensitive, but the fact that someone was suspended isn't.

Sorry, but I'm less than impressed.
You should have known better and you're getting off easily.

More than a week has passed since this "Apology" was posted, and OP still hasn't answered a single point raised by any of the answers or comments.

I get that this is not a nice position to be in, but it's one of his own making.

It feels like OP is just ignoring this problem now, or hiding from it, which makes me wonder why he posted this in the first place. The more he pretends the responses to his apology don't exist, the more disingenuous it looks, to me.

Concerning rep retained status-completed

I accept full responsibility for my actions. All 1850 posts have been deleted.

Despite the post deletions, you have retained approximately between 15,000 to 21,000* in reputation from those posts in accordance to the default system logic for retaining reputation on deleted posts (post has score >3 and was deleted 60 days after creation).

To you, that may not sound like much. But that's 75 days of rep cap. That's enough to unlock the third highest level of reputation-based site privilege. Only 0.0735% of users have that much. It's no small amount.

Since you are committing to take responsibility for your actions, I would like to see you follow through by determinedly seeking for that reputation to be scrubbed as well.

*the number 15,000 obtained in the following way:

• 1355584 - 1193750 - (427*200) = 76434 (2024-04-23 minus rep on rep on 2023-03-01 minus rep in that period from daily rep cap)
• 1355584 - 1292783 - (7*200) = 61401 (rep on 2024-04-23 minus rep on 2024-05-03 after end of suspension minus rep in that period from daily rep cap)
• 76434 - 61401 = 15033

Cross checking with SEDE:

• rep retained from bounties: ~13600
• rep retained from accept,up,down votes: ~7988
• 13600 + 7988 = 21588

I do regret my posts, not only because they violated Stack Overflow's trust, but also because they potentially misled other users relying on the content I posted.

I'm personally surprised that a lengthy compromise of personal integrity isn't on this list. Regrets reflect an understanding of what was wrong. And indeed, you've shown that you have a general understanding of what negative effect this has had on others and on the platform, and have committed not to make this specific rule violation again. But I wonder about deeper lessons learnt...

Re: comments above

Some of the comments above (now deleted) think that these answers were simply to enhance existing subject-matter-expertise. You may want to take a look at this visualization of the variety of tags that VonC answers in over time (this SEDE query includes the posts that have been deleted):

For each month, it shows the sum of the following calculation over each unique tag for which VonC answered any question with that tag in that month: T_tag / T_total, where T_total is the sum over tags in that month of how many tags were in each question VonC answered in that month, and T_tag is the number of questions VonC answered in that month that had that tag. If all questions in a month only have one same tag, then the value for that month is one. More tag variation means higher number. Answering in a tag less than other tags also means higher number.

Well, good for you, I guess.

Yet moving forward is not going to change that, quote, one of the oldest users on the platform by account age and — at the time of writing — the number #2 by all-time reputation, unquote, felt it justified that the rules don’t apply to them. That such a user felt it justified because, quote, [their] intentions were to contribute helpful information, unquote.

That’s exactly the motivation I hear regularly when closing posts, when voting, heck, even when editing or commenting constructively. Go away, we are helping here, we don’t care for your rules!
Sure, one could lie to oneself. Oh, those are new users, they don’t know better. And yada, Yoda, yada…

Now, this isn’t a how dare you post. This isn’t a how could you post.
Because honestly, it doesn’t matter who exactly overstepped the line. There’s another just around the corner, and maybe another right here and just not caught yet.
Maybe I would have met them on the next Q&A I curate. Maybe I will meet them on the next Q&A I rely on for help. But surely I can’t lie to myself anymore that they are not around, that they are not setting such an example. That they are not sabotaging, at a massive scale, why I rely on Stack Overflow for help.

If even people like you don’t give a jam about the rules either, why bother with them?
Apparently, people want that kind of Stack Overflow. Apparently, experts want that kind of Stack Overflow. Well, good for you, I guess. 🎤⬇️

What happens to the 1850 questions that now have lost answers? This is a mess that still needs fixing.

A query that finds your deleted answers (plus others - I'm not sure how to narrow it down) reveals a bunch of highly upvoted ones (10k-only links to the top 5: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), all of them on questions that have lots of views and lack any other high-score answer. I imagine that in at least some cases, those were good answers and the questions have become far less useful to future readers as a consequence of their deletion. Were those answers AI-generated? Were they correct? What should we do to fix this situation, now?

This post is pretty frustrating. You apologise but don't explain why or to what extent you used AI to generate posts, why the mods decided to delete all your posts from the time period (even some valuable high-score ones that look to me like they're surely not AI-authored), what rules (if any) the mods have laid down to you about you revisiting those questions and answering them with manually written answers, or what guidelines there are about people farming your deleted answers as a source of inspiration for replacement answers of their own. Those are things I care about far more than your feelings of remorse, and would like to see addressed.

I think we can probably assume that:

• the one third of answers that you wrote in the time period without AI were generally correct and valuable
• some proportion of the AI-generated posts were also correct and valuable despite being AI-generated
• in both cases, the presence of your answers will have tended to deter others from redundantly answering the same questions - meaning the questions from which your useful answers have been deleted will tend to now not have useful answers at all.

So we probably have somewhere from a few hundred to 1850 bricks fallen out of our library that we now need to repair. I ask both you, the mods, and the broader community: how do we do that?

I believe I can say, on behalf of the Moderation Team, that we accept your apologies.

It is refreshing — and hopefully inspiring for all users who have been or will be in a similar spot — to see that you decided to own up to your mistakes. Thank you for that.

Rest assured, it was not a decision taken lightly: quite the opposite. Without entering into details which might be best kept private, multiple people spent a great deal of time reviewing the situation as thoroughly as it was reasonably possible and making sure Community policy could be upheld while being fair at the same time.

You are one of the oldest users on the platform by account age and — at the time of writing — the number #2 by all-time reputation. We are certain you have abundant real-world expertise in your field, which you have generously contributed to our platform throughout the years. You do not need to resort to underhanded means to keep being the great contributor you have always been.

Welcome back.

I’m very pleased to see this post, and am happy to see the return of an extremely valued member of this community. I hope that everyone involved, and participating on Meta, will continue to handle this with the same measure of grace displayed here. I also wish to thank the moderators for their patience, discretion, and compassion in the handling of this situation.

While we don't believe that an apology to us is necessary - responsiveness to community concerns is in our job, after all - we believe that your acceptance of responsibility is model behavior for the community as a whole.

By using AI-generated content, I contributed to the dilution of the quality of answers on the platform

This implication is incorrect: using AI-generated content doesn't necessarily contribute to the dilution of the quality of answers on the platform. As for your case, I subsampled 20 answers you wrote during that AI period and they look better than the average SO answer, so I'd also question whether that is even true in your case.

Furthermore, it took 1233 answers (1850 * 2/3) for someone to finally realize you were using AI: that clearly shows AI is good enough to be used on SO.

Lastly, I'd remark that this mass deletion caused several questions to be deleted by Roomba. It's unfair to the OPs, who aren't even notified of any deletion, and it's Internet unfriendly to break links for no good reasons.

So you have written two things:

1. (a) I did something wrong.
2. (a) I apologise for what I did wrong.

There are basically two reactions:

1. (b) Some people accept your apologies.
2. (b) Some people find your apologies insufficient.

So, this is what I expect from your side:

3. (a) I am willing to do things in order to pay back for the bad things I've done.

This is what I expect from other people:

3. (b) Set up a list of things he can do in order to pay back for the wrong things he did.
4. (b) Making sure that the list is feasible but sufficiently large.
5. (b) Any proposals, just for the sake of revenge-seeking, are to be disregarded.

Good luck.