That viral Reddit post about food delivery apps was an AI scam | Hacker News Reader

That viral Reddit post about food delivery apps was an AI scam

theverge.com

41 pointscoloneltcb48 comments

https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_de...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461563

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Is this the same publication that reported on the post without any hedge whatsoever?

Yes, it was: https://www.theverge.com/transportation/853018/a-developer-f...

"A developer for a ‘major food delivery app’ says the ‘algorithms are rigged against you."

"There’s some debate as to whether the claims are as bad as the OP makes them seem, but it seems like there’s general agreement that the gist of the post is legit."

And, yet, they don't even mention it in their original post. They haven't issued a correction. Isn't this journalism 101?

Why to retract when rage bait sells clicks.

Discussion on the post in question:

I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461563

  > The Verge put the original 586-word Reddit post through several free online AI detectors, in addition to Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The results were mixed: Copyleaks, GPTZero, Pangram, Gemini, and Claude all pegged it as likely AI-generated, but ZeroGPT and QuillBot both reported it as human-written. ChatGPT played it down the middle.

Why does anyone, let alone a journalist, trust these? They are worse than useless.

Can you actually ask an LLM if content is AI-generated? Surely that wouldn't work reliably at all?

Of course you can ask an LLM if the content is AI-generated. It's easily at least 50% accurate too.

Given the context of what I personally think about the content, the AI is much more accurate than that.

(Is it any wonder why people fall in love with bots that always agree with them?)

You know, I wouldn't be surprised if the AI was less than 50% accurate. I'm not claiming that in general, but I'm also certain it would be possible to construct a dataset such that the AI would do far worse than a coin flip.

You know that it's not possible to do worse than a coin flip, right? If you're getting it 100% wrong, I'll just do the opposite of what you say, and have a 100% correct predictor.

The threshold isn't 50% because the distribution of human and AI written cases isn't naturally 50-50. So a coin flip will underperform always guessing the more frequent class. Where it gets interesting is if the base is unknown or variable over time or between application domains. Like, since AI written text is being generated faster than the human kind, soon guessing AI every time will be 99% accurate. That doesn't mean such a detector is useful.

When we say "coin flip" in these situations we mean "chance", ie the prior distribution. Otherwise a predictor of the winning lottery numbers that's "no better than a coin flip" would mean it wins the jackpot half the time.

Yup! My point is that the 'coin flip baseline' model that's as good as chance isn't actually trivial to create, for an unbalanced and time varying underlying distribution.

Only if you have that data available to you, the brain to analyze it and the freedom to chose.

You can ask, but you can't really trust the results as the differences between AI generated text and human text are getting smaller every day AND LLMs aren't typically created to specifically identify the difference.

LLMs aren't intelligent. They're just very fancy math and a lot of smoke and mirrors.

If an LLM were capable of reliably detecting AI-generated content, then it would also be capable of producing content that does not appear to be AI generated.

So either A) LLMs are intentionally, universally making their content look AI-generated despite having the capability to do otherwise or B) LLMs cannot reliably detect AI output and their responses on the subject are complete BS.

> If an LLM were capable of reliably detecting AI-generated content, then it would also be capable of producing content that does not appear to be AI generated.

Those are two very different classes of problems. You do not automatically get one if you have the other, in any resource constrained situation. Yes, you can infinitely iterate a RNG into a content producer given a classifier, but that presumes infinite resources.

Usually yes, but the SynthID contained in the alleged ID card is a pretty big giveaway, as it's basically a guarantee that the image was generated by Gemini.

+1,000,000. Journalist would be an inflated title given this reporters understanding of what LLMs can and can't do. I'd label them a blogger, commenter, or "enthusiast" given their understanding of the area they're covering.

So, The Verge wrote an article claiming something was generated by AI, by asking an AI.

There was no investigation, they just asked an AI and published what the AI said.

Well, they also provided a fake "employee badge" to the Verge, which Uber confirmed was fake.

The wording doesn't indicate that they asked themselves.

Plus, I'm finding other sources that did more investigation: https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/an-ai-generated-reddit-post...

A side note to this: a lot of the longer highly upvoted Reddit posts in subs like /AskReddit have clearly been written with AI help. The three parallel element structure with a a splashy conclusion sentence for synthesis is a dead giveaway.

I am irrationally irritated by this.

that it’s rage-inducing is not yet clearly irrational

It has to be clarified though, that askreddits main purpose is to gather karma for new accounts. It's the only popular sub without karma thresholds. So is common knowledge to spam it with new accounts to make them usable. It's the official advice even I think

The Verge's article here is the least compelling. They report it with the same confidence and style as their original article when the Reddit post first made waves.

I recommend reading https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax... instead. It offers better reasoning, and an honest reflection about how close they were to getting taken in by the original Reddit post.

Yeah this article lays it out much better than the verge.

> “On the other hand, LLMs are weapons of mass fabrication,” said Alexios Mantzarlis, co-author of the Indicator, a newsletter about digital deception. “Fabulists can now bog down reporters with evidence credible enough that it warrants review at a scale not possible before. The time you spent engaging with this made up story is time you did not spend on real leads. I have no idea of the motive of the poster — my assumption is it was just a prank — but distracting and bogging down media with bogus leads is also a tactic of Russian influence operations (see Operation Overload).”

Crazy new times ahead.

Focusing on the AI content generation aspect of this is disappointing to me, since those tools are fuzzy at best and even if the post was AI generated, it isn't necessarily a red flag since the user could be trying to disguise their writing style.

There are plenty of other signs this story is likely fake. The author claiming to be posting from a library on New Years' Day (most government buildings are closed) and was responding over 10 hours on the account. He's using a throwaway and a "burner laptop" at the library, but he also says he put his two weeks' notice in yesterday (also odd that this is on New Years' Eve) which would make identifying him trivial.

Fake stories get to the front page of Reddit every day, I wish journalists were pointing out the actual signs not to trust something to act as a better example.

It was a good indication of how things like conspiracy theories spread.

He gave his notice on NYE? Oh, he's probably just fudging that so he's not caught. He doesn't care about getting caught but he's on a burner laptop? Oh, people do weird things when they're stressed. And on and on.

Then, of course, the ultimate fallback: Well it sounds like something they would do. So even if most of this is made up, the bad things are still probably true.

I think this is one of those occasions when the story was so good that "journalists" skipped any validation and went right to publication. Someone played the media, and they bought it hook line and sinker.

Reddit post in question - https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_de...

https://archive.ph/1XUka

I think the telling part is that so many people believed it without questioning.

Like there's the oft-debunked "factoid" that says that the Windows Start Menu is written in react native... While the fact itself may be false, the fact that so many people readily believed it says a lot about the start menu.

If someone were to make a similar claim about something like HN was built in react then almost everyone here would instantly fact check.

I’m not sure if the Verge has been living under a rock, but like 80% of social media posts are rewritten by AIs these days, by the OP themselves. Heck, even a large chunk of articles and blogs too. Without making a judgement either way, that does not mean the story itself is fake.

It sounded too fishy, but a lot of what was written does sound like something uber eats would do.

I took a course on critical thinking once which taught me to at least pause and ask questions when I read something sensationalist.

I’ve learned that when my impulse is to say “It sounds like something X would do,” it often leads me down very wrong paths.

Just because the vibes point in that direction often doesn’t mean it’s the truth.

This is exactly how misinformation starts and real people pay the price for generations. Just look at the MSG (monosodium glutamate) untruth that has hurt many Chinese restaurants and Chinese Americans over the years. Misinformation is not victimless.

Judging from the backlash on this, someone really wants you to know this was an "AI scam".

https://archive.ph/56IKd

Reddit, the official fact checked source of Internet.

Try with some more media criticality next time.

Suppose I should revisit this:

  It's Reddit; of course it's fake.

  I do congratulate this author, though. If posted it to a different site, I would believe it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46462027

...Congratulations, clanker!

Finding non-agenda driven, unbiased truth on Reddit is comparable to finding a needle in a haystack. It's a dumping ground of misinformation and a playground for bots.

Hacker News fakes posts later ( AKA the famous Dropbox post )

The best web archive is 22 hours in (.is is 2 hours with same top) and the top believes the post. Nihilist and a NPC failure to understand tech and industry[1] FTW

https://web.archive.org/web/20260103035501/https://news.ycom...

[1] Both programming and business logic are rubbish in the post. A childhish view of the world from people who have never been there.

[edit] If Hacker News can show posts archived after they drop off page x they should do that.

If Hacker News wants to pretend they are archiving history show an accessible frozen copy. If we can't delete old posts because the history matters, this does too.

It wouldn't hurt to watch voting real time either over 24-48 hours. This is scrape-able if collected real time. Data project left to reader. No idea if you'd see anything. India votes different to the USA, you might see that.

I can't make out what you're specifically saying here, but "fakes posts later" doesn't pattern-match in my mind to anything we actually do. All of things we actually do regarding re-upping posts, timestamps, and so on, I've explained many times (e.g. about timestamps here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and we're always happy to answer good-faith questions.

As for "the famous Dropbox post", if you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863, there was nothing fake about it.

Read their other comments. Why do you allow this as a mod?

We don't. That account has been banned for months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45545661.

If you're seeing their other comments, it must be because you have 'showdead' turned on in your profile. Anyone is welcome to turn that on and see all the comments that have been killed for various reasons, but it's important to understand that if you do, you're signing up to see the worst that the internet brings to HN.

As I mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538728, users sometimes forget that they turned 'showdead' on, then wonder why they're seeing such dreadful stuff in the comments. Could it be that that's what happened in this case?

There's no definitive proof that the original post was AI, and it sounds very much in line with DoorDash and Uber's ethics (or lack thereof), so I'm still inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the original post.

> it sounds very much in line with DoorDash and Uber's ethics (or lack thereof)

That is quite literally why misinformation spreads.

> sounds very much in line with

perfect description of what LLMs are best at

Sorry, if you give the “benefit of the doubt” to anything on Reddit you are going to be misinformed. Reddit was all lies before AI; it hasn’t gotten better.

It’s funny that the Verge thinks this is the AI scam, when literally all of Reddit is a massive AI scam and you can’t miss it if you scroll the front page for more than 10 minutes and realize the comments/upvotes/content don’t track and aren’t even remotely organic.

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