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Sam Altman says that bots are making social media feel ‘fake’

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Sam Altman says that bots are making social media feel ‘fake’ Julie Bort PM PDT · September 8, 2025 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

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

He makes a valid point that fandoms, led

Techcrunch event Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025 Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before Sept 26 to save up to $668. Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025 Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before Sept 26 to save up to $668. San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 REGISTER NOW 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

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

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.

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