X fanatic and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman had an epiphany on Monday: Bots have made it unimaginable to decide whether or not social media posts are in point of fact written via people, he posted.
The conclusion got here whilst studying (and sharing) some posts from the r/Claudecode subreddit, that have been praising OpenAI Codex. OpenAI introduced the device programming carrier that takes on Anthropic’s Claude Code in Might.
In recent times, that subreddit has been so stuffed with posts from self-proclaimed Code customers pronouncing that they moved to Codex that one Reddit person even joked: “Is it imaginable to modify to codex with out posting an issue on Reddit?”
This left Altman questioning what number of of the ones posts had been from actual people. “I’ve had the strangest enjoy studying this: I suppose it’s all pretend/bots, even if on this case I do know codex enlargement is in point of fact robust and the rage here’s actual,” he confessed on X.
He then live-analyzed his reasoning. “I feel there are a number of items occurring: actual other folks have picked up quirks of LLM-speak, the Extraordinarily On-line crowd drifts in combination in very correlated tactics, the hype cycle has an overly ‘it’s so over/we’re so again’ extremism, optimization drive from social platforms on juicing engagement and the comparable manner that writer monetization works, different corporations have astroturfed us so i’m further delicate to it, and a number extra (together with more than likely some bots).”
To decode that just a little, he’s accusing people of beginning to sound like LLMs, even if LLMs — spearheaded via OpenAI — had been actually invented to imitate human communique, proper all the way down to the em sprint. And OpenAI’s fashions surely skilled on Reddit, the place Altman used to be a board member thru 2022, and used to be disclosed as a big shareholder all the way through the corporate’s IPO final yr.
He makes a legitimate level that fandoms, led via extraordinarily, always-on social media customers, do have a tendency to act in ordinary tactics. Many teams can devolve into hatefests if overrun via the ones 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 generate profits. Honest sufficient.
However then Altman confesses that probably the most causes he thinks the pro-OpenAI posts on this subreddit could be bots is as a result of OpenAI has additionally been “astroturfed.” That most often comes to posts via other folks or bots paid for via the competitor, or paid via some third-degree contractor, giving the competitor believable deniability.
We don’t have any proof of astroturfing (although it’s imaginable). However we did see how OpenAI subreddits became at the corporate after it launched GPT 5.0. As an alternative of waves of reward from the devoted over the brand new fashion, many indignant posts had been voted up. Other people took to Reddit and X to whinge about the whole lot from GPT’s persona to the way it burned thru credit with out completing duties.
An afternoon after the bumpy unlock, Altman did a Reddit ask-me-anything consultation on r/GPT during which he confessed to rollout problems and promised adjustments. The GPT subreddit hasn’t ever absolutely recovered its earlier stage of affection, with customers nonetheless posting steadily on how a lot they dislike the adjustments with GPT 5.0. Are they human? Or are they, as Altman turns out to indicate, pretend someway?
Altman surmises, “The online impact is in some way AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very pretend in some way it in point of fact 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 just right at writing, that LLMs have change into a virulent disease no longer simply to social media websites (that have continuously had a bot drawback) however to varsities, journalism, and the courts.
Whilst we don’t understand how many Reddit posts are written via bots, or are fictional accounts via people the use of LLMs, it’s most likely a considerable quantity. Knowledge safety corporate Imperva reported that over part of all web site visitors in 2024 used to be non-human, in large part because of LLMs. X’s personal bot Grok says: “The precise numbers aren’t public, however 2024 estimates counsel loads of tens of millions of bots on X.”
A number of cynics have recommended that Altman’s lament used to be his first forays into advertising and marketing OpenAI’s rumored social media platform. In April, the Verge reported that any such undertaking to tackle X and Fb used to be on the earliest levels. This product might or would possibly not exist. Altman might or would possibly not have had ulterior motives for suggesting that social media is simply too pretend nowadays.
However motives apart, if OpenAI is making plans a social community, what are the chances that it could be a bot-free zone? And, humorous sufficient, if it did the opposite and banned people, the consequences most likely wouldn’t be other. No longer best do LLMs nonetheless hallucinate info, but if researchers on the College of Amsterdam constructed a social community composed solely of bots, they discovered that the bots quickly shaped cliques and echo chambers for themselves, too.
