X fanatic and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman had an epiphany on Monday: Bots have made it inconceivable to find out whether or not social media posts are actually written by people, he posted.
The belief got here whereas studying (and sharing) some posts from the r/Claudecode subreddit, which have been praising OpenAI Codex. OpenAI launched the software program programming service that takes on Anthropic’s Claude Code in Might.
These days, that subreddit has been so full of posts from self-proclaimed Code customers asserting that they moved to Codex that one Reddit consumer even joked: “Is it potential to modify to codex with out posting a subject on Reddit?”
This left Altman questioning what number of of these posts have been from actual people. “I’ve had the strangest expertise studying this: I assume it’s all faux/bots, despite the fact that on this case I do know codex progress is absolutely sturdy and the pattern right here is actual,” he confessed on X.
He then live-analyzed his reasoning. “I feel there are a bunch of issues happening: actual individuals have picked up quirks of LLM-speak, the Extraordinarily On-line crowd drifts collectively in very correlated methods, the hype cycle has a really ‘it’s so over/we’re so again’ extremism, optimization stress from social platforms on juicing engagement and the associated means that creator monetization works, different corporations have astroturfed us so i’m further delicate to it, and a bunch extra (together with in all probability some bots).”
To decode that a bit of, he’s accusing people of beginning to sound like LLMs, despite the fact that LLMs — spearheaded by OpenAI — have been actually invented to imitate human communication, proper right down to the em sprint. And OpenAI’s fashions undoubtedly skilled on Reddit, the place Altman was a board member by way of 2022, and was disclosed as a big shareholder through the firm’s IPO final yr.
He makes a sound level that fandoms, led by extraordinarily, always-on social media customers, do are likely to behave in odd methods. Many teams can devolve into hatefests if overrun by these venting frustrations to their brethren.
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Altman additionally throws a dig on the incentives when social media websites and creators depend on engagement to generate profits. Honest sufficient.
However then Altman confesses that one of many causes he thinks the pro-OpenAI posts on this subreddit may be bots is as a result of OpenAI has additionally been “astroturfed.” That sometimes includes posts by individuals or bots paid for by the competitor, or paid by some third-degree contractor, giving the competitor believable deniability.
We’ve no proof of astroturfing (although it’s potential). However we did see how OpenAI subreddits turned on the corporate after it launched GPT 5.0. As a substitute of waves of reward from the devoted over the brand new mannequin, many indignant posts have been voted up. Individuals took to Reddit and X to complain about every thing from GPT’s persona to the way it burned by way of credit with out ending duties.
A day after the bumpy launch, Altman did a Reddit ask-me-anything session on r/GPT by which he confessed to rollout points and promised modifications. The GPT subreddit has by no means totally recovered its earlier stage of affection, with customers nonetheless posting recurrently on how a lot they dislike the modifications with GPT 5.0. Are they human? Or are they, as Altman appears to suggest, faux in a roundabout way?
Altman surmises, “The online impact is by some means AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very faux in a means it actually didn’t a yr or two in the past.”
If that’s true, who’s fault is it? GPT has led fashions to change into so good at writing, that LLMs have change into a plague not simply to social media websites (which have all the time had a bot downside) however to colleges, journalism, and the courts.
Whereas we don’t know what number of Reddit posts are written by bots, or are fictional accounts by people utilizing LLMs, it’s seemingly a considerable quantity. Knowledge safety firm Imperva reported that over half of all web site visitors in 2024 was non-human, largely as a consequence of LLMs. X’s personal bot Grok says: “The precise numbers aren’t public, however 2024 estimates counsel a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of bots on X.”
A number of cynics have advised that Altman’s lament was his first foray into advertising and marketing OpenAI’s rumored social media platform. In April, the Verge reported that such a undertaking to tackle X and Fb was on the earliest levels. This product might or might not exist. Altman might or might not have had ulterior motives for suggesting that social media is simply too faux as of late.
However motives apart, if OpenAI is planning a social community, what are the chances that it might be a bot-free zone? And, humorous sufficient, if it did the reverse and banned people, the outcomes seemingly wouldn’t be completely different. Not solely do LLMs nonetheless hallucinate info, however when researchers on the College of Amsterdam constructed a social community composed totally of bots, they discovered that the bots quickly shaped cliques and echo chambers for themselves, too.
