A Reddit user claiming to be a whistleblower from a food delivery app has been outed as a fake. User writes viral post stating that the company he works for exploits drivers and users.
“You always suspect that the algorithm is hijacking you, but the truth is more interesting than the conspiracy theory,” the whistleblower said.
He claimed to be drunk and in a library using public Wi-Fi, where he typed a long screed about how companies exploit legal loopholes to steal drivers’ tips and wages with impunity.
The claim, unfortunately, is believable – DoorDash is right already sued for stealing tips from drivers, resulting in $16.75 million settlement. But in this case, the poster has made up his story.
People lie on the internet all the time. But it’s not uncommon for a post to reach Reddit’s front page, get more than 87,000 upvotes, and get posted to other platforms like X, which gets it. another 208,000 likes and 36.8 million impressions.
Casey Newton, reporter behind Platformer, write he contacted the Reddit poster, who in turn contacted him on Signal. A Redditor shared what appears to be a photo of an UberEats employee badge, as well 18-page “internal document” outlines the company’s use of AI to determine the “desperation score” of individual drivers. But when Newton tries to verify that the whistleblower’s account is legitimate, he realizes that he is being baited into an AI hoax.
“For most of my career so far, documents shared with me by whistleblowers have been very reliable because they have been around for so long,” Newton wrote. “Who would take the time to put together an 18-page technical document detailing market dynamics just to troll journalists? Who would bother to create a fake badge?”
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There are certainly bad actors who want to deceive journalists, but the prevalence of AI tools makes fact-checking more rigorous.
Generative AI models often fail to detect that an image or video is synthetic, making it difficult to determine whether the content is real. In this case, Newton can use Google Gemini to confirm that the image was created with AI tools, thanks to Google. SynthID watermark, which can withstand cropping, compression, filtering, and other attempts to modify the image.
Max Spero – founder Pangram Labsa company that creates detection tools for AI-generated text – can deal directly with the problem of distinguishing real and fake content.
“AI slop on the internet has gotten a lot worse, and I think part of this is due to the increased use of LLMs, but other factors as well,” Spero told TechCrunch. “There are companies with millions in revenue that can pay for ‘organic engagement’ on Reddit, which is basically just trying to go viral on Reddit with an AI-generated post that mentions your brand name.”
Tools like Pangram can help determine whether a text is AI-generated, but especially when it comes to multimedia content, these tools aren’t always reliable — and even if a synthetic post is proven to be fake, it may have gone viral before it was retracted. So now, we’re still scrolling through social media like detectives, wondering if anything seems real.
Case in point: When I told my editor I wanted to write about the “viral AI food delivery hoax that hit Reddit this weekend,” he thought I was talking about it. because. Yes – there was more than one “viral AI food delivery hoax on Reddit this weekend.”