Has Sam Altman spent too much time talking with ChatGPT lately, or has he finally taken a break from his delusion-inducing chatbot and smelled the roses?
We ask because the man responsible for unleashing the Automated Soulless Text Machine on the world has recently caught on that the internet has started feeling super fake, and he's now pontificating about this novel observation again on X-formerly-Twitter, seemingly mystified at how this all came to pass.
Prompting his latest musing was a screenshot another user shared showing a series of gushing posts on the Reddit forum dedicated to Claude Code, the AI coding assistant from OpenAI's competitor Anthropic.
"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," Altman wrote in a tweet.
His analysis is that it isn't just AI spam that's creating this impression, but the fact that people are themselves beginning to write like the chatbots they're helplessly addicted to.
"Real people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak," Altman said. Along with that, he blamed the extreme back and forth of the hype cycle, "optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement," and, of course, bots.
"The net effect is somehow AI Twitter/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn't a year or two ago," Altman concluded.
There's a lot going on here, not the least that Altman's first instinct after seeing a competitor being lavished with praise — astroturfed or not — is that it must be phony. And of course it's true that the internet is becoming increasingly artificial under corporate dominance and a deluge of bots. So too are the people that use it, as we all to varying degrees adopt the image-consciousness of influencers.
But most striking of all is Altman's inability to address the data center-sized elephant in the room: how he's literally spearheading the tech responsible for accelerating all this. It'd be like the CEO of Spotify complaining that too much music is streamed these days, instead of listened to on a CD (which Daniel Ek, despite his proclivity for making stupefyingly tone-deaf remarks and having even dumber opinions, not to mention bankrolling weapons research, has never done.) If this isn't how Altman wants customers to be using his trillion dollar technology, then how should they be? To spend an hour ordering cupcakes?
Hilariously, it also appears to be something that Altman only caught onto recently. Last week, he admitted that he was starting to sympathize with the so-called "dead internet theory" after observing "there are really a lot of LLM-run Twitter accounts now."
The dead internet, by the way, is a conspiracy theory that holds that the web has been taken over by AI models and other autonomous machines to such an extent that most if not all of your online interactions are actually just a bot-maintained illusion. It's not true, of course, but it's become a shorthand for pointing out clear instances of social media, "dead" or not, being faker than ever — like posts that go ludicrously viral even though they're actual nonsense, filled with replies that don't even seem to address the content in question. Or, like, Shrimp Jesus.
The point being is that anyone chronically online enough has realized this years ago, and Altman, after supercharging the trend with ChatGPT, is only somehow taking notice.
"The architect of the dead internet is a captain of the obvious," observed one Reddit user.
More on OpenAI: GPT-5 Is Making Huge Factual Errors, Users Say
Share This Article