Not making an accusation, but it reminds me of a chat transcript oddity I saw while using opencode back in August. It replace a syllable of a word with a punctuation mark that has the same pronunciation or HTML entity. It was something like "...the &litude of that waveform..." but I can't remember exactly, nor which model I was using. I just noticed it and thought, that's weird. A few days later I read about text watermarking and figured it may be that.

Its the letter thorn, which was turned into y in print back in the day because ... cost. It was originally the leading letter in the (or thee) instead of th.

Nowadays, and for quite a lot of the past, people like to riff on "ye olde shoppe" and the like to imply "ye olden dayes".

The problem, as I don't really see it, is that a possible cost cutting measure in printing seems to have swung back and changed the English alphabet. I don't really buy the official explanation for the loss of thorn. I think it simply wandered off and got bored, it looks quite like a p too. I gather that it originally sounded slightly different to "th" but English has largely lost that distinction.

I used an actual thorn, because I can!

I wondered about that too, i think they use a compose key and accidentally pressed it

a thorny question to be sure