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).”
To decode that a little, he’s accusing humans of starting to sound like LLMs, even though LLMs — spearheaded by OpenAI — were literally invented to mimic human communication, right down to the em dash. And OpenAI’s models definitely trained on Reddit, where Altman was a board member through 2022, and was disclosed as a large shareholder during the company’s IPO last year.
He makes a valid point that fandoms, led by extremely, always-on social media users, do tend to behave in odd ways. Many groups can devolve into hatefests if overrun by those venting frustrations to their brethren.
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Sam 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.
We have no evidence of astroturfing (though it is possible). But we did see how OpenAI subreddits turned on the company after it released GPT 5.0. Instead of waves of praise from the faithful over the new model, many angry posts were voted up. People took to Reddit and X to complain about everything from GPT’s personality to how it burned through credits without finishing tasks.
A day after the bumpy release, Altman did a Reddit ask-me-anything session on r/GPT in which he confessed to rollout issues and promised changes. The GPT subreddit has never fully recovered its previous level of love, with users still posting regularly on how much they dislike the changes with GPT 5.0. Are they human? Or are they, as Altman seems to imply, fake in some way?
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.
While we don’t know how many Reddit posts are written by bots, or are fictional accounts by humans using LLMs, it is likely a substantial number. Data security company Imperva reported that over half of all internet traffic in 2024 was non-human, largely due to LLMs. X’s own bot Grok says: “The exact numbers aren’t public, but 2024 estimates suggest hundreds of millions of bots on X.”
Several cynics have suggested that Altman’s lament was his first forays into marketing OpenAI’s rumored social media platform. In April, the Verge reported that such a project to take on X and Facebook was at the earliest stages. This product may or may not exist. Altman may or may not have had ulterior motives for suggesting that social media is too fake these days.
But motives aside, if OpenAI is planning a social network, what are the odds that it would be a bot-free zone? And, funny enough, if it did the reverse and banned humans, the results likely wouldn’t be different. Not only do LLMs still hallucinate facts, but when researchers at the University of Amsterdam built a social network composed entirely of bots, they found that the bots soon formed cliques and echo chambers for themselves, too.
