Sam Altman Says Bots Are Making Social Media Feel 'Fake' (techcrunch.com) 83
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: 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. 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 that takes on Anthropic's Claude Code in May. 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: "Is it possible to switch to codex without posting a topic on Reddit?"
This left Altman wondering how many of those posts were from real humans. "I have had the strangest experience reading this: I assume it's all fake/bots, even though in this case I know codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real," he confessed on X. He then live-analyzed his reasoning. "I 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 'it's so over/we're so back' extremism, optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement and the related way that creator monetization works, other companies have astroturfed us so i'm extra sensitive to it, and a bunch more (including probably some bots)."
[...] Altman also throws a dig at the incentives when social media sites and creators rely on engagement to make money. Fair enough. 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 "astroturfed." 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. [...] Altman surmises, "The net effect is somehow AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn't a year or two ago." If that's true, who's 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, journalism, and the courts.
This left Altman wondering how many of those posts were from real humans. "I have had the strangest experience reading this: I assume it's all fake/bots, even though in this case I know codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real," he confessed on X. He then live-analyzed his reasoning. "I 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 'it's so over/we're so back' extremism, optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement and the related way that creator monetization works, other companies have astroturfed us so i'm extra sensitive to it, and a bunch more (including probably some bots)."
[...] Altman also throws a dig at the incentives when social media sites and creators rely on engagement to make money. Fair enough. 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 "astroturfed." 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. [...] Altman surmises, "The net effect is somehow AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn't a year or two ago." If that's true, who's 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, journalism, and the courts.
Leopard Face Interaction? (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory "Uh, d'uh!"
Re:Leopard Face Interaction? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not like social media was super real and authentic to begin with. Maybe back in 2005 when you could copy and paste some shitty javascript onto your Myspace page, rearraging your top friends, and at least giving a feeling your 'social media' space was yours. Since the early days of facebook its been about showing you either 1) have a better life than other people 2) have more fun 3) are more attractive or 4) sharing family photos, which never ever show up in the feed for anyone anyway unless you only have 2 connections.
If people feel like AI is making it less authentic its because they could never see what was photoshopped or see how inauthentic their favorite friend or influencer was with their bare feet photo in the beach with no one else around or their perfect starbucks latte in some european capital or reposting some shitmeme or viral video that 10 million other people also 'authentically shared'.
Re:Leopard Face Interaction? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Its not like social media was super real and authentic to begin with."
This. So much this. The biggest con social media ever put over its users was convincing them that it was a pipeline to "real" people's lives.
Re: Leopard Face Interaction? (Score:1)
What about Arab spring?
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That was the use of the communications tools on the platforms because they were effectively out-of-band for the various impacted nations' security services. Hell, I signed up for Twitter during that period for the express purpose of appealing to Twitter to not perform disruptive systems maintenance during the time of day when those countries in the +5 to UTC timezones needed the platform to remain online.
And that was the last time I used Twitter as well.
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The thing is, it sort of was in its early days. When facebook came out, it really was just your friends, and the events they where throwing. Facebook was still in the "We have no idea how to monetize this, so we just scale for now" phase of pre-enshitification. And prior to that, we had myspace and a few things that where... interesting but not quite the full social media yet, and prior to THAT we had the original social media, IRC and Usenet, and yeah that was never really enshitified as it didnt belong to
I think us nerds misunderstand Facebook (Score:2)
I know people who use Facebook the way it's meant to be used in a positive way.
A buddy of mine likes to fish. So he finds his fishing buddies on facebook. Heck he even got a really nice fishing trip for free because one of the more affluent guys in the Facebook group he fishes with had bought a pricey fishing trip and then suddenl
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Huh.
I mean, all that human stranger interaction just sounds weird and icky to me.
But then I've been on slashdot for awhile, so what do I know about SIH (Standard Issue Human) behaviour.
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It doesn't "feel" fake - it IS fake. And it was already fake before bots, it's just now a lot more obvious.
This is good (Score:5, Interesting)
The more fake bots on social media the more likely to drive humans away. Eventually it will just be bots talking to each other and companies swapping funds. The best thing for humanity would be large scale social media to end. Reddit, Facebook, Xitter, etc.
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Considering the content of your posts, there's no reason to think you care about anything.
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Well I'm encouraged that you do. Enough so that I, too, care enough to comment.
Re: This is good (Score:1)
Can I care about free speech, open borders, and nonviolent noncooperation with all state laws? Remember Gandhi, "the highest form of ciivil disobedience is refusal to obey any state-made law"?
Re: This is good (Score:2)
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You've been banned from two separate social media networks? Wow, that's one heck of an accomplishment.
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So is this Maddox's Slashdot account?
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No, although I have no idea who Maddox is. Pretty sure it's not me though.
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It's the two instances together that suggests maybe you have something to do with the problem as getting banned from two separate social media services is not at all normal. A third would guarantee it as far as I'm concerned.
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And that's great you're engaging in that ridiculousness.
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The funny thing here is that going by your post it seems that you know you're the problem but don't care. I'd have felt a little empathy for you if you had told me the two bannings were freak events but all you're doing here is claiming entitlement to act like a twat.
Turns out what you say and do has repercussions in this world.
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"I should be able to act like a piece of shit with no consequences". Gotta love the modernist entitlement angle here, "I'm entitled to act like a piece of shit but you're not entitled to treat me as such". Turns out free speech goes both ways. Who knew?
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Twitter pre-Musk or banned from X?. If the former you've been able to get your account back for years now. If the latter then that is an impressive feat of buffoonery.
Re: This is good (Score:1)
What if I was banned from pre-Musk twitter for telling a despicable trader to kill himself, and Musk continued the policy that you can't advocate for suicide?
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Do you have the exact tweet and the context it was in?
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The fact this is your response leads me to think yes, yes there is otherwise you'd just post it.
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Because you live in a society that is still on it.
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I just hope AI is being used long enough for the likes of Google to push for nuclear or fusion power. Then at least we'll have a net positive at the end of this and the last decade.
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I wish I could believe that. I'm still seeing people delete forums and independent sites and moving exclusively to social media.
I don't think people even care if social media is fake. Numbers go burr.
I've been talking to real humans offline more (Score:4, Insightful)
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Eh, I already ignore the flesh-bot looking things shambling around the streets today. Doubt I'd notice a difference.
Sam "Weinermobile" Altman (Score:2, Interesting)
this is a stealth press release (Score:2)
ALL this shit coming from these AI grifters is narrative-shaping trying to pump up their valuation by advancing the narrative that the current and/or anticipated near-future models represent an inflection point exceeding a linear relationship with the number of GPUs thrown at them. Bad press the same as good press: anything from them that says AI could be a real risk is pushing the idea that there's a "there" there.
Don't get sucked in.
Humans say Sam Altman is a cunt (Score:5, Informative)
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Sam Altman is a dirty money-grubbing cunt.
What do you have against cunts that you'd compare them to that parasitic pant-load? Personally, I'm rather fond of cunts.
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But it tells one something about this site that the parent is currently modded "Insightful" !
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like HR was sitting there looking over your shoulder while you typed.
That's because they are, i literally just got an email that my actual HR manager made a post today, of course I'm going to temper my thoughts there. LinkedIn isn't "social media" for actual people it's intended for you to put a front on. "We all wear masks" etc etc
A jab at Misk (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a jab at Musk to undermine his promise to rid bots from X. It will also hurt X's value.
Not true (Score:2)
Socials go beyond feelings. They ARE FAKE!
The devil blaming bots? (Score:5, Insightful)
About 80 percent of Facebook is AI, be it clickbait, or AI images pretending to be real. Your AI is leading humanity to the point where we believe nothing any more. Congratulations, you will have a place in the history books, as the poster child for the end of civilization where no one believes anything at all.
Who knows, this story might just be AI written.
Who cares about Sam Altman's musings? + bot fraud (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, this bot management discussion is bullshit. It's not that hard for any company with twitter or facebook's budget to screen for bots MUCH better than they do now. There are many companies offering good bot management solutions....for prices they can easily afford. Major retailers like Nike do it already.
The reason you see bots on sites that sell ads is that they're frauding advertisers. They're collecting money from views from bots. If they eliminated bots, which they could easily do overnight, their profits would go way down. They enjoy stealing from businesses too much to do anything about it. It's just 3rd act enshittification.
Re:Who cares about Sam Altman's musings? + bot fra (Score:4, Insightful)
Sam Altman is just a nicer version of Trump or Musk.
An unsupportable claim if ever I have seen one.
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Sam Altman is just a nicer version of Trump or Musk.
An unsupportable claim if ever I have seen one.
Really, he's not nicer. He just doesn't have carte blanche to run roughshod over society like Musk and Trump do. Though he is working on it.
Both insincerely manipulate the media (Score:4, Interesting)
Sam Altman is just a nicer version of Trump or Musk.
An unsupportable claim if ever I have seen one.
Both are manipulating the media to ensure they're constantly getting covered. Tesla famously never bought ads because Musk was in the news constantly. That was an intentional strategy. Trump ensured he was in the news constantly, even when out of office. If there wasn't a legit reason for him to be in the news, he'd make up some bullshit culture war. It's classic attention economy tactics.
Sam Altman seems like a good guy...so did Musk at first. Even trump has benevolent positions before the who birtherism shittiness. He's submitting controversial stories to keep in the press and to keep people thinking about ChatGPT. LLMS are just fancy autocomplete....far more useful than one would suspect a fancy word prediction engine, but not intelligent and have not proven themselves to actually replace human labor. They got a massive hype bubble which has made people like Altman extravagantly wealthy...but they know it will pop soon. Doubts are starting to surface...not from engineers like me who use it daily, but from more mainstream users...the cracks are starting to show.
He knows this ride is coming to a halt soon. After all, today's Apple event should have been showcasing Apple Intelligence updates...but the project was canceled?...not sure the status, but it ain't working...and I tried the preview. It was SHIT at summarizing my texts and e-mails.
Apple Intelligence gave me a fucking scare when it told me my parents had died....when it was my sister saying she was dead tired after visiting my parents.
Again, ChatGPT is supposed to be powering iOS to glory, but it failed...publicly...horribly...and few are complaining. Sam Altman knows that if he can stay in the press and in the discussion, he gets to be the Steve Jobs of the AI age...not the CEO of the company that fucked over Apple's AI feature and it's grandiose failure....which may result in a class-action lawsuit.
I fucking agree with everything he says about society. I would probably like the guy if I had a conversation with him. However, after surviving the Trump era, so far...and seeing Musk trying to do the same...while a bit too high on Ketamine....I am now seeing the game...something I suspected before, but now see more clearly as just more media manipulation in Trump's footsteps.
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Tesla famously never bought ads because Musk was in the news constantly. That was an intentional strategy.
What's weird (at least to me) is that Tesla still hasn't figured out that tying 100% of your ongoing brand identity to such an unstable and unlikable person - a guy who's thoroughly torched any relationship with the group from which most of their customers come - might not be the best idea.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/0... [cnbc.com]
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Isn't he the AI Brah who bilked folks outta $3B with crypto a few years ago? He gots fuzzy Bozo The Clown hair?
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Sam Altman is just a nicer version of Trump or Musk.
He doesn't seem nicer. For example [bbc.com] this quote:
"Ms Altman claim say her broda bin "groom and manipulate" and and do sex acts on am for many years wey include "rape, sexual assault, molestation, sodomy, and battery", according to court filing wey BBC see."
And for a more detailed analysis of the eloquent orator, this article [slate.com]:
" Altman is quietly thought of among his industry as “ambitious, cunning, even Machiavellian.”
Welcome to 2015 (Score:4, Interesting)
The signal to noise ratio has been unbearable for a long time. Even with curation, it deteriorates quickly. Maybe the lesson is that we didn't really want to talk to *everyone*.
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The signal to noise ratio has been unbearable for a long time. Even with curation, it deteriorates quickly. Maybe the lesson is that we didn't really want to talk to *everyone*.
I'm quite happy to talk to everyone - I just don't want to listen to them.
Facebook Even has Official Bots! (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently noticed in one of my groups that there was a poster that would post questions veaguely related to the group, but not really accurately relevant to what was going on. When I looked into it more, I realized that the poster was a "Group AI" - essentially a bot whose job is to post questions to drive engagement. BLECH.
We really are going to end up with the Dead Internet Theory and an AI Ouroboros. Facebook bots posing questions, which well invariably end up getting answered by other bots, which will feed into the next round of AI training data. I can't decide if I'm lucky enough to have at least experienced the golden age of the internet, or unfortunate enough to know what the internet could be...
It's worse than this. (Score:2)
Maybe AI is doing some good then. (Score:2)
Hey, maybe this will get people off these long since socially poisoned social networks.
*Feels* fake? (Score:3)
Sam Altman Says Bots Are Making Social Media Feel 'Fake'. [....] 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. [...] Altman surmises, "The net effect is somehow AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn't a year or two ago."
Bots make social media feel fake? It makes it fake.
Like, WTF does this typical rich white asshole think the " social " part of "social media" is anyways?
And he's just had an 'epiphany' on this? What a fucking dumbass he is.
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If I understood the babbling correctly, he says bots, people acting like bots and people adopting the speech patterns of bots make the whole social media feel like bots even where it is not.
Social Media has always been fake (Score:2)
Oh, maybe there was a brief span of authenticity in the early years where people were just posting pics of the grandchildren or whatnot (pro tip: it's still a really bad idea to post pics of kids on the internet).
Ultimately, this is a good thing: just like when old mainstream media decided to throw away the faux-objectivity* and openly declare their politics, maybe the infusion of AI slop into social media will likewise grossly devalue the medium to the nothingness it deserves.
*(it never was; it might have
It's all grey goo (Score:2, Insightful)
Took him long enough to catch on to what everyone already knows.
And it isn't just social media, but 90% of web search results look like they were copy/pasted. Many web sites climbing to the top of search results are crap, while the stuff I actually want doesn't seem to come up no matter how many times I go to the next page of search results.
The internet has become grey goo.
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And image search has gotten worse too.
But for that I suspect a large part of it is Google giving preferential treatment to social media sites' content rather than to the normal web. And as social media sites' content gets infected with AI-generated content, that would give that preference to that content by-extension.
"fake" - you don't say ! (Score:2)
So he claims that social media - the platform where everyone pretends to be more happy, more active, better looking, more interesting, more travelled, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, - feels "fake" ?
Man.
Next he's going to say that artificial sweeteners taste might not be natural.
Seriously, though, social media has been the domain of bots for at least a decade. Even people who actually write their posts themselves use bots to cross-post to all the different platforms and at "optimal" times. Nothing on social media
Not like the old "real" days (Score:2)
Remember when social media was real? I mean, of course everyone partied, went on cruises, was always having fun, was the center of everything... so, so real.
And who made that happen, hmm? (Score:2)
Altman is the most flat-out sociopath of all the techbros and it's not close.
When even Elon Musk thinks you're a lying two-faced snake, that's called "a clue".
Wrong (Score:2)
Social media have always been fake. The lives of all the people you see on social media are nothing but curated experiences of their seemingly perfect lives that have nothing to do with reality.
It's bad for AI training data. (Score:2)
So we know when AI trains on data trained by AI, the LLMs become more and more unstable. (Source) [newscientist.com]
Meaning the problem is not just "Social Media will suck more." It also means that a large treasure trove of data used by AI companies to train their bots will become increasingly toxic. And this will hurt the value proposition of companies like Reddit (which depend on selling their data for training AI), as well as companies like OpenAI, who needs more and more data to train on.
Nothing new (Score:2)
Sam Altman is going kill OpenAI (Score:3)
He's going to shut it down on December 25, 2025 as a gift to the world as he is beginning to realize that the enterprise he has built is harmful to humanity.
And??? (Score:2)
And before AI it wasn't? No, it was simply a manual process.
It was aready fake (Score:2)
Social media has always been fake, no bots needed.
When exactly did social media NOT feel fake? (Score:2)
It's felt, and been, fake since the beginning. People don't post a realistic picture of their lives, they post the dramatic and interesting parts of life, while most of life is *actually* just mundane.