X fanatic and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman had an epiphany on Monday: Bots have made it not possible 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 had been praising OpenAI Codex. OpenAI launched the software program programming service that takes on Anthropic’s Claude Code in Could.
These days, that subreddit has been so stuffed with posts from self-proclaimed Code customers asserting that they moved to Codex that one Reddit person even joked: “Is it attainable to change to codex with out posting a subject on Reddit?”
This left Altman questioning what number of of these posts had been from actual people. “I’ve had the strangest expertise studying this: I assume it’s all pretend/bots, though 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 strain from social platforms on juicing engagement and the associated method that creator monetization works, different corporations have astroturfed us so i’m additional delicate to it, and a bunch extra (together with most likely some bots).”
To decode that slightly, he’s accusing people of beginning to sound like LLMs, though LLMs — spearheaded by OpenAI — had been actually invented to imitate human communication, proper all the way down to the em sprint. And OpenAI’s fashions positively educated on Reddit, the place Altman was a board member via 2022, and was disclosed as a large shareholder throughout the firm’s IPO final yr.
He makes a legitimate 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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Sam additionally throws a dig on the incentives when social media websites and creators depend on engagement to make cash. Honest sufficient.
However then Altman confesses that one of many causes he thinks the pro-OpenAI posts on this subreddit is perhaps bots is as a result of OpenAI has additionally been “astroturfed.” That sometimes entails 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 attainable). However we did see how OpenAI subreddits turned on the company after it launched GPT 5.0. As an alternative of waves of reward from the trustworthy over the brand new mannequin, many indignant posts had been voted up. Individuals took to Reddit and X to complain about all the things from GPT’s character to the way it burned via credit without finishing tasks.
A day after the bumpy launch, Altman did a Reddit ask-me-anything session on r/GPT wherein he confessed to rollout points and promised modifications. The GPT subreddit has by no means absolutely recovered its earlier stage of affection, with users still posting regularly on how a lot they dislike the modifications with GPT 5.0. Are they human? Or are they, as Altman appears to suggest, pretend indirectly?
Altman surmises, “The online impact is in some way AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very pretend in a method 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 develop into so good at writing, that LLMs have develop into a plague not simply to social media websites (which have at all times had a bot downside) however to schools, 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 doubtless a considerable quantity. Information safety firm Imperva reported that over half of all internet traffic in 2024 was non-human, largely because of LLMs. X’s personal bot Grok says: “The precise numbers aren’t public, however 2024 estimates counsel a whole bunch of tens of millions of bots on X.”
A number of cynics have advised that Altman’s lament was his first forays into advertising and marketing OpenAI’s rumored social media platform. In April, the Verge reported that such a venture to tackle X and Fb was on the earliest phases. This product might or might not exist. Altman might or might not have had ulterior motives for suggesting that social media is just too pretend as of late.
However motives apart, if OpenAI is planning a social community, what are the chances that it will be a bot-free zone? And, humorous sufficient, if it did the reverse and banned people, the outcomes doubtless 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 formed cliques and echo chambers for themselves, too.