A Reddit post about a scam from a food delivery app was found to be created by AI

A Reddit user who claims to be a whistleblower from a food delivery app has been outed as a hoaxer. User wrote post viruses saying that the company he works for is exploiting drivers and users.

“You guys always suspect that the algorithms are lying to you, but the truth is more depressing than the conspiracy theories,” the whistleblower wrote.

He said he was drunk and wanted to use its public Wi-Fi at the library, when he wrote the story that the company was taking advantage of to steal tips and wages from drivers with impunity.

The claims were, unfortunately, believable – DoorDash actually he was was prosecuted for stealing tips from drivers, which resulted in a $16.75 million to solve. But in this case, the picture had made its own story.

People lie online all the time. But it’s not unusual for such articles to reach the front page of Reddit, collect more than 87,000 votes, and be passed on to other platforms like X, where they got it. 208,000 more likes and 36.8 million views.

Casey Newton, reporter behind Platform developer, he wrote that he contacted the Reddit icon, who he contacted on Signal. The Redditor shared what appears to be a photo of his UberEats badge, as well An 18-page “internal document”. explaining how the company is using AI to determine the “desperation” of individual drivers. But when Newton tried to prove that the whistleblower’s story was legitimate, he realized that he was being manipulated by an AI.

“For most of my career up to this point, the document that was told to me by the referee would have been seen as reliable because it would have taken a long time to put together,” Newton said. “Who would take the time to create an 18-page detailed report on market trends just to run a reporter? Who would bother to create a fake badge?”

There have always been bad actors trying to manipulate the media, but the proliferation of AI tools has made fact-finding more sophisticated.

Generative AI models often fail to recognize whether a photo or video is artificial, making it difficult to determine if it is real. In this case, Newton was able to use Google’s Gemini to confirm that the image was created by an AI tool, thanks to Google. SynthID watermark, which can withstand cropping, compression, filtering, and other attempts to modify the image.

Max Spero – founder Pangram Labsa company that creates a text recognition tool created by AI – works directly with the problem of distinguishing the real from the fake.

“The decline in AI online has gotten worse, and I think some of that is because of the number of LLMs, and other things,” Spero told TechCrunch. “There are companies with millions of dollars that can pay to ‘take action’ on Reddit, which means they will try to infect Reddit with AI-generated posts that mention your name.”

Tools like Pangram can help determine if a text has been created by AI, but especially when it comes to multimedia content, these tools are not always reliable – and even if a post is proven to be fake, it may have been infected before it was destroyed. So for now, we’re about to scroll through social media like detectives, wondering if everything we’re seeing is real.

The case: When I told an editor that I wanted to write about “the AI-powered food that was on Reddit this week,” he thought I was talking. something else. Yes – there was “a lot of fake AI food delivery on Reddit this week.”