A viral Reddit post alleging fraud from a food delivery app turns out to have been generated by artificial intelligence

A Reddit user claiming to be a whistleblower from a food delivery app has been exposed as fake. The user wrote a viral post claiming that the company he works for was exploiting drivers and users.

“You always suspect that 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 was at the library to use the public Wi-Fi, where he was writing this long letter about how the company exploited legal loopholes to steal drivers’ tips and wages with impunity.

Unfortunately, these claims were not believable – in fact, DoorDash He was She was sued for stealing tips from drivers, resulting in a $16.75 million settlement. But in this case, the poster had made up his story.

People lie on the Internet all the time. But it’s not common for posts like this to make it to the front page of Reddit, garner more than 87,000 upvotes, and be cross-posted on other platforms like X, where it received another 208,000 likes and 36.8 million impressions.

Casey Newton, the journalist behind the game Platformer, wrote that he contacted the Reddit poster, who then contacted him on Signal. The Redditor shared what looks like a photo of an UberEats employee badge, as well as an 18-page “internal document” outlining the company’s use of artificial intelligence to determine the “degree of desperation” of individual drivers. But when Newton tried to verify the whistleblower’s story, he realized he was the victim of an AI hoax.

“For most of my career up to this point, the document the whistleblower shared with me seemed highly credible in large part because it would have taken so long to compile,” Newton wrote. “Who would take the time to prepare a detailed 18-page technical document on market dynamics just to fool a reporter? Who would go to the trouble of creating a fake badge?”

There have always been bad actors seeking to deceive reporters, but the proliferation of AI tools has made fact-checking more rigorous.

Generative 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 photo was taken using an AI tool, thanks to Google’s SynthID watermark, which can withstand cropping, compression, filtering and other attempts to alter the image.

Max Spiro, founder of Pangram Labs, a company that makes a tool for detecting AI-generated text, is directly working on the problem of distinguishing between real and fake content.

“The slowdown in online AI has gotten much worse, and I think part of this is due to increased use of LLM degree holders, but there are other factors as well,” Spiro told TechCrunch. “There are companies with millions in revenue that can pay for ‘organic engagement’ on Reddit, which is really just an attempt to go viral on Reddit through AI-generated posts mentioning your brand name.”

Tools like Pangram can help determine whether text has been generated by artificial intelligence, but especially when it comes to multimedia content, these tools are not always reliable — and even if an artificial post is proven to be fake, it may have already gone viral before it is debunked. So, for now, we’re left scrolling through social media like detectives, guessing if anything we see is real.

Case in point: When I told an editor that I wanted to write about “the viral AI food delivery scam that was on Reddit this weekend,” she thought I was talking about something else. Yes, there was more than one “viral AI food delivery hoax on Reddit this weekend.”