{"id":130928,"date":"2025-09-09T19:15:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T19:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/130928\/"},"modified":"2025-09-09T19:15:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T19:15:11","slug":"sam-altman-says-that-bots-are-making-social-media-feel-fake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/130928\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman says that bots are making social media feel ‘fake’\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 <\/a>that takes on Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code in May.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cIs it possible to switch to codex without posting a topic on Reddit?\u201d<\/p>\n

This left Altman wondering how many of those posts were from real humans. \u201cI have had the strangest experience reading this: I assume it\u2019s all fake\/bots, even though in this case I know codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real,\u201d he confessed on X.<\/p>\n

He then live-analyzed his reasoning. \u201cI 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 \u2018it\u2019s so over\/we\u2019re so back\u2019 extremism, optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement and the related way that creator monetization works, other companies have astroturfed us so i\u2019m extra sensitive to it, and a bunch more (including probably some bots).\u201d<\/p>\n

To decode that a little, he\u2019s accusing humans of starting to sound like LLMs, even though LLMs \u2014 spearheaded by OpenAI \u2014 were literally invented to mimic human communication, right down to the em dash. And OpenAI\u2019s models definitely trained on Reddit<\/a>, where Altman was a board member through 2022, and was disclosed as a large shareholder<\/a> during the company\u2019s IPO last year.<\/p>\n

He makes a valid point that fandoms, led by extremely, always-on social media users, do tend to behave in odd ways. Many groups can devolve into hatefests if overrun by those venting frustrations to their brethren. <\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Altman also throws a dig at the incentives when social media sites and creators rely on engagement to make money. Fair enough.<\/p>\n

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 \u201castroturfed.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

We have no evidence of astroturfing (though it is possible). But we did see how OpenAI subreddits turned on the company<\/a> after it released GPT 5.0. Instead of waves of praise from the faithful over the new model, many angry posts were voted up. People took to Reddit and X to complain about everything from GPT\u2019s personality to how it burned through credits without finishing tasks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A day after the bumpy release<\/a>, Altman did a Reddit ask-me-anything<\/a> session on r\/GPT in which he confessed to rollout issues and promised changes. The GPT subreddit has never fully recovered its previous level of love, with users still posting regularly<\/a> on how much they dislike the changes with GPT 5.0. Are they human? Or are they, as Altman seems to imply, fake in some way?<\/p>\n

Altman surmises, \u201cThe net effect is somehow AI twitter\/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn\u2019t a year or two ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s true, who\u2019s 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<\/a>, journalism<\/a>, and the courts.<\/a><\/p>\n

While we don\u2019t know how many Reddit posts are written by bots, or are fictional accounts by humans using LLMs, it is likely a substantial number. Data security company Imperva reported that over half of all internet traffic in 2024<\/a> was non-human, largely due to LLMs. X\u2019s own bot Grok says<\/a>: \u201cThe exact numbers aren\u2019t public, but 2024 estimates suggest hundreds of millions of bots on X.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several cynics have suggested that Altman\u2019s lament<\/a> was his first foray into marketing OpenAI\u2019s rumored social media platform<\/a>. In April, the Verge reported that such a project to take on X and Facebook was at the earliest stages. This product may or may not exist. Altman may or may not have had ulterior motives for suggesting that social media is too fake these days.<\/p>\n

But motives aside, if OpenAI is planning a social network, what are the odds that it would be a bot-free zone? And, funny enough, if it did the reverse and banned humans, the results likely wouldn\u2019t be different. Not only do LLMs still hallucinate facts, but when researchers at the University of Amsterdam built a social network composed entirely of bots, they found that the bots soon formed cliques and echo chambers for themselves<\/a>, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"X enthusiast and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman had an epiphany on Monday: Bots have made it impossible to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":130929,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,2579,13961,1314,105],"class_list":["post-130928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-reddit","tag-sam-altman","tag-social-media","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}