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

theverge.com

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

#31

Post by dang »

NedF wrote: post #17

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 th…

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.

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

#33

Post by thot_experiment »

g3f32r wrote: post #20
varun_ch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#35

Post by [deleted] »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #29
CivBase wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resou…

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by Simulacra »

Corence wrote: post #22

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…

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.

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

#38

Post by [deleted] »

semiquaver wrote: post #6

> 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 usele…

[deleted]

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

#39

Post by stavros »

thot_experiment wrote: post #33
g3f32r wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#40

Post by stavros »

semiquaver wrote: post #6

> 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 usele…

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.
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