X enthusiast and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman had an epiphany on Monday: Bots have made it impossible to determine whether social media posts are really written by humans, he posted.
The realization came while reading (and sharing) some posts from the r/Claudecode subreddit, which were praising OpenAI Codex. OpenAI launched the software programming service that takes on Anthropic’s Claude Code in May.
Lately, that subreddit has been so filled with posts from self-proclaimed Code users announcing that they moved to Codex that one Reddit user even joked: “Is it possible to switch to codex without posting a topic on Reddit?”
This left Altman wondering how many of those posts were from real humans. “I have had the strangest experience reading this: I assume it’s all fake/bots, even though in this case I know codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real,” he confessed on X.
He then live-analyzed his reasoning. “I think there are a bunch of things going on: real people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak, the Extremely Online crowd drifts together in very correlated ways, the hype cycle has a very ‘it’s so over/we’re so back’ extremism, optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement and the related way that creator monetization works, other companies have astroturfed us so i’m extra sensitive to it, and a bunch more (including probably some bots).”
To decode that a little, he’s accusing humans of starting to sound like LLMs, even though LLMs — spearheaded by OpenAI — were literally invented to mimic human communication, right down to the em dash. And OpenAI’s models definitely trained on Reddit, where Altman was a board member through 2022, and was disclosed as a large shareholder during the company’s IPO last year.
He makes a valid point that fandoms, led by extremely, always-on social media users, do tend to behave in odd ways. Many groups can devolve into hatefests if overrun by those venting frustrations to their brethren.
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Sam also throws a dig at the incentives when social media sites and creators rely on engagement to make money. Fair enough.
But then Altman confesses that one of the reasons he thinks the pro-OpenAI posts in this subreddit might be bots is because OpenAI has also been “astroturfed.” That typically involves posts by people or bots paid for by the competitor, or paid by some third-degree contractor, giving the competitor plausible deniability.
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