A Reddit user claiming to be a whistleblower from a food delivery app has been called a fake. User wrote a viral post claiming that the company he worked for was exploiting its drivers and users.
“You always suspect that the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually much more depressing than the conspiracy theories,” the alleged whistleblower wrote.
He claimed he was drunk and at the library using their public wi-fi, where he typed this long rant about how the company was exploiting legal loopholes to steal drivers’ tips and wages with impunity.
These claims were, unfortunately, believable – DoorDash in fact it was was sued for stealing tips from drivers, resulting in a $16.75 million resolution. But in this case, the poster had made up his story.
People lie on the internet all the time. But it’s not that common for posts like this to appear on the front page of Reddit, garner over 87,000 upvotes, and cross over to other platforms like X, where it reached another 208,000 likes and 36.8 million impressions.
Casey Newton, reporter back Platform, he wrote that he contacted the Reddit poster, who then contacted him on Signal. The Redditor shared what appeared to be a photo of the UberEats employee badge, as well as a “internal document” of eighteen pages describing the company’s use of artificial intelligence to determine the “desperation level” of individual drivers. But as Newton tried to verify that the informant’s account was legitimate, he realized he had been baited into an AI hoax.
“For most of my career up to this point, the document the informant shared with me would have seemed very credible in large part because it would have taken so long to compile,” Newton wrote. “Who would take the time to write a detailed 18-page technical paper on market dynamics just to troll a journalist? Who would bother to create a bogus signal?”
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There have always been bad actors trying to trick journalists, but the prevalence of artificial intelligence tools has made fact-checking even more rigorous.
Genetic AI models often fail to detect whether an image or video is synthetic, making it difficult to determine whether the content is real. In this case, Newton was able to use Google’s Gemini to confirm that the image was created by the AI tool, thanks to SynthID watermark, which can withstand cropping, compression, filtering and other attempts to change an image.
Max Spero — its founder Pangram Labsa company making a detection tool for AI-generated text — is working directly with the problem of distinguishing real from fake content.
“The decline of AI on the Internet has gotten much worse, and I think part of that is due to the increased use of LLMs, but also other factors,” Max Spero, founder of Pangram Labs, told TechCrunch. “There are companies with millions in revenue that can pay for ‘organic engagement’ on Reddit, which means they’ll try to go viral on Reddit with AI-generated posts that mention your brand name.”
Tools like Pangram can help you determine if text is AI-generated, but especially when it comes to multimedia content, these tools aren’t always reliable — and even if a fake post turns out to be fake, it may have already gone viral before it’s debunked. So for now, we’re left to scroll through social media like detectives, guessing if something we’re seeing is real.
Case in point: when I told an editor I wanted to write about the “viral AI food delivery prank that was on Reddit this weekend,” she thought I was talking about something else. Yes — there was more than one “viral AI food delivery prank on Reddit this weekend.”
