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Title: Sam Altman Says Bots Are Making Social Media Feel 'Fake'

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/09/09/0048...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: 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)." [...] Altman 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. [...] Altman surmises, "The net effect
is somehow AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn't a
year or two ago." If that's true, who's fault is it? GPT has led models to
become so good at writing, that LLMs have become a plague not just to social
media sites (which have always had a bot problem) but to schools, journalism,
and the courts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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