A Reddit user claiming to be a whistleblower from a major food delivery app has been exposed as a fake. The user wrote a viral post alleging that the company he worked for was exploiting its drivers and users. He stated, “You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories.”
The supposed whistleblower claimed to be drunk and using a library’s public Wi-Fi to type a long screed about how the company exploited legal loopholes to steal drivers’ tips and wages with impunity. Those claims were, unfortunately, believable, as DoorDash was actually sued for stealing tips from drivers, resulting in a multi-million dollar settlement. But in this specific case, the poster had fabricated his story.
People lie on the internet all the time, but it is less common for such posts to hit the front page of Reddit, garner over 87,000 upvotes, and get cross-posted to other platforms where it received hundreds of thousands of additional likes and millions of impressions.
Journalist Casey Newton wrote that he contacted the Reddit poster, who then communicated with him on Signal. The Redditor shared what appeared to be a photo of an UberEats employee badge and an eighteen-page “internal document” outlining the company’s use of AI to determine a “desperation score” for individual drivers. However, as Newton tried to verify the whistleblower’s account, he realized he was being baited into an AI hoax.
Newton noted that for most of his career, such a document would have seemed highly credible simply because it would have taken so long to fabricate. He questioned who would go to the trouble of creating a detailed technical document and a fake badge just to troll a reporter.
There have always been bad actors seeking to deceive reporters, but the prevalence of AI tools has made fact-checking require even more rigor. Generative AI models often fail to detect if an image or video is synthetic, making it challenging to determine if content is real. In this instance, Newton was able to use an AI tool to confirm that the image was generated, thanks to a digital watermark that can withstand cropping, compression, and other alterations.
Max Spero, founder of a company that makes a detection tool for AI-generated text, works directly on the problem of distinguishing real and fake content. He stated that AI-generated content on the internet has gotten worse, partly due to increased use of large language models, but also due to other factors. He mentioned that some companies pay for orchestrated “organic engagement” on platforms like Reddit, using AI-generated posts designed to go viral.
Tools can help determine if text is AI-generated, but especially for multimedia content, these tools are not always reliable. Even if a synthetic post is proven to be fake, it might have already gone viral before being debunked. For now, users are left scrolling social media like detectives, second-guessing if anything they see is real.
This point was underscored when one editor, upon hearing about the “viral AI food delivery hoax on Reddit this weekend,” thought the writer was referring to a different incident. Indeed, there was more than one viral AI food delivery hoax on Reddit that weekend.