Viral Reddit Post About Food Delivery Apps Was an AI Scam 32
A viral Reddit "whistleblower" post accusing a major food delivery app of systemic exploitation is "most likely AI-generated," reports the Verge. From the report: The original post by user Trowaway_whistleblow alleged that an unnamed food delivery company regularly delays customer orders, calls couriers "human assets," and exploits their "desperation" for cash, among other indefensible actions. Nearly 90,000 upvotes and four days later, it's become increasingly clear that the post's text is probably AI-generated. Considering the delivery app industry track record of exploitation of its drivers, it's easy to see why so many people believed this was the real thing.
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. Reached by The Verge on Signal, Trowaway_whistleblow provided an image of an Uber Eats employee badge. That image was generated or edited with Google AI, according to Gemini. The image shows an Uber Eats logo above two black boxes, presumably covering an employee name and photo, and the words "senior software engineer." It's odd that an engineer's badge would have the Uber Eats logo, and not the Uber logo, according to Gemini. That, in addition to slightly misaligned words and warped coloration at the edge of the green border, are reasons Gemini thinks it's inauthentic. (Uber later confirmed that Uber Eats-branded employee badges do not exist.) "Not only are the claims fake, but they're also dead wrong," Uber spokesperson Noah Edwardsen told The Verge. Uber Eats' Andrew Macdonald wrote on X, "This post is definitively not about us. I suspect it is completely made up. Don't trust everything you read on the internet."
DoorDash CEO Tony Xu also denied the redditor's "appalling" allegations. "This is not DoorDash, and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated the kind of culture described in this Reddit post," Xu said in a post on X.
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. Reached by The Verge on Signal, Trowaway_whistleblow provided an image of an Uber Eats employee badge. That image was generated or edited with Google AI, according to Gemini. The image shows an Uber Eats logo above two black boxes, presumably covering an employee name and photo, and the words "senior software engineer." It's odd that an engineer's badge would have the Uber Eats logo, and not the Uber logo, according to Gemini. That, in addition to slightly misaligned words and warped coloration at the edge of the green border, are reasons Gemini thinks it's inauthentic. (Uber later confirmed that Uber Eats-branded employee badges do not exist.) "Not only are the claims fake, but they're also dead wrong," Uber spokesperson Noah Edwardsen told The Verge. Uber Eats' Andrew Macdonald wrote on X, "This post is definitively not about us. I suspect it is completely made up. Don't trust everything you read on the internet."
DoorDash CEO Tony Xu also denied the redditor's "appalling" allegations. "This is not DoorDash, and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated the kind of culture described in this Reddit post," Xu said in a post on X.
1099 laws need to be updated to stop the abuse (Score:3)
1099 laws need to be updated to stop the abuse as the level of control in some gig work may make the workers at the very least an part time w2 for the booked job.
AI or not (Score:2)
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MBAs reading the story about desperation scores: Write that down, write that down!
AI washing? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're using a library's Wi-Fi out of fear that people might track your online activities, then having an AI rephrase this post to hide your writing style could be seen as exhibiting a similar level of paranoia. This message was changed by an AI, so you have no way of knowing who the actual author is.
Re: AI washing? (Score:2)
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Let's collect the tells:
1) I bet the detectors matched on the em-dash. This may be a factor, but is only one.
2) You're right about not being clever about when to post.
3) They use typographic apostrophes. This could also be a mobile app or pre-written in Word.
4) Adding (PM) to Product Managers doesn't add to the post and some LLM like to do this.
5) I find no major typos or grammar mistakes.
7) I see almost no GPTism. The em-dash is there, but no usual slop word. There maybe is a "It's not X it's Y" in the sen
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i'm pretty good at writing ranty complaints... and usually there's at least some level of anger even if i write it over days or "leave it until tomorrow". but i'd surely make more mistakes than that if i were drunk.
on the "flips a field in the JSON" ... that does make sense and it's sort of equivalent to "in the db", but in a micro-services architecture more of the services (like said dispatcher) deal with whatever they got from the "order service" which could be serialized as json or dealt with as such
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See I bought that bit until the next sentence said they handed in their 2 weeks a day ago. Can't be that many engineers quitting the day before it was posted.
This could be misdirection though, for defense in depth. Posting from the library and using a burner laptop are the first layer of protection - they make it more difficult to track the leaker's IP or identify him by the hardware he used, but the information in the message is still only accessible to a smallish group of people. Adding a bit more confusion could be the second layer and intended to mislead the investigators into focusing on people who quit recently.
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See I bought that bit until the next sentence said they handed in their 2 weeks a day ago. Can't be that many engineers quitting the day before it was posted.
This could be misdirection though, for defense in depth. Posting from the library and using a burner laptop are the first layer of protection - they make it more difficult to track the leaker's IP or identify him by the hardware he used, but the information in the message is still only accessible to a smallish group of people. Adding a bit more confusion could be the second layer and intended to mislead the investigators into focusing on people who quit recently.
Standard conspiracy theory logic -- "Information that is consistent and verifiable proves the conspiracy is real. Information that is inconsistent and unverifiable is due to coverup efforts, which proves the conspiracy is real. Every piece of information could conceivable be the outcome of a conspiracy, therefore the conspiracy is real."
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First of many (Score:2)
The comment says it all. We have not seen the last of these AI-improved scams.
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More importantly everything in the post is stuff that gig slop companies have been caught doing on multiple occasions.
That's why it's not surprising if it was AI generated because the AI is going to take a little bit of everything that it finds on the internet from otherwise reliable sources and mix it into a slurry. So what you're seeing here is a bunch of associate press articles turned into a post. The articles would have been abou
Uh, huh. Sounds legit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Uber spokesperson says, "This story that seems completely factual about practices people continually complain about us doing must be completely made up because uh... uhm, AI and stuff. I mean, you should totally trust AI to do everything, but when you commoners use it, it's to make stuff up about us corporations who are loving, giving caretakers of society. Oh, yeah, and this can't be about us. Because it's made up. Yeah, that's it. That's the ticket!"
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There have indeed always been redditors who double down on "we did it reddit" moments.
The question is whether it's true (Score:5, Informative)
Using AI to write your complaint is a perfectly valid use of AI. It maintains your points, cleans up the language, and makes it impossible to say who the author is just by the writing style.
The question is entirely whether the accusations are true.
And gig companies are absolutely exploiting workers and customers, while the specific details listed may or may not be true.
If you work 40 hours a week and can't afford a house, a car, a family, putting your kids through college, and an annual multiweek vacation, you're being robbed by your boss.
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Using AI to write your complaint is a perfectly valid use of AI. It maintains your points, cleans up the language, and makes it impossible to say who the author is just by the writing style.
Yep, 100% agree.
The question is entirely whether the accusations are true
Damn, I already used “100% agree” and I hate “110% agree!”, so....um.... Bingo!
And gig companies are absolutely exploiting workers and customers, while the specific details listed may or may not be true.
If you work 40 hours a week and can't afford a house, a car, a family, putting your kids through college, and an annual multiweek vacation, you're being robbed by your boss.
If you work 40 hours a week and were promised the moon yeah something wrong is going on, although if you were promised peanuts and you get peanuts I’m less convinced, and the most common trick of all is to say this (whispers “can”) pay good, but present a contract that says maybe we give you real dollars, maybe we pay peanuts, circumstances vary.
Even so I’m still
Wondered what happened to this story (Score:2)
I saw this about an hour/hour and a half ago on the front page in a red highlight. it was around the VSCode story. Then it disappeared until now.
A glitch in the Matrix?
Did AI just aggregate all the complaints (Score:1)
Sounds like par for the course. (Score:2)
Most companies call employees "human resources," and exploit their "desperation" for cash, among other indefensible actions.
Detectors are unreliable (Score:2)
Also, the Verge are morons.
You can't ask ChatGPT "is this AI generated"! LLMs don't have permanent memory. ChatGPT can't confirm "I wrote this for another user", it can't know. Besides that it's unlikely to be
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Yep, detectors people (universities mostly) pay a lot of money for are unreliable. Plus I fully expect something is “AI generated” if you take a true story and ask for an AI summary or rewording of it, and manually audit for hallucinations. I mean it may or may not be detected, but it is AI generated. “An AI wrote it” doesn’t mean it is false any more then “an AI wrote it” means it is true.
So a detector saying it is AI generated probably doesn’t tell us
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At least Google integrated their SynthID check with Gemini. Instead of uploading to some checker site, you upload it to an AI chat and just ask if it is generated. And ChatGPT starts their image generator, when you ask the language model for it. With LLM being able to call tools (they were provided) the LLM chat becomes the primary interface for some services. I am not sure if ChatGPT has a watermark checker yet, but when it has, it will surely integrate it as a tool you can run with natural language into t
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They were talking about text, I don't believe there's watermarking for that. There's just statistical guesses, and I don't think most LLMs are likely to be any good at it.
Then this is all a distraction. Maybe he filtered the text through/images a LLM to make it less recognizable, maybe it's just coincidence. It doesn't matter. The only important matter is whether it's actually true or not.
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I've read about approaches to watermark text (basically you shift the distribution), but I didn't see any service implementing a watermark verifier for text yet. I won't be surprised if some of ChatGPT's slop IS watermarking, though.