An AI-Generated Reddit Post Fooled the Internet. It Was Only Half of an Elaborate Scam.

I traded Signal messages with someone purporting to have serious dirt on Uber. They used AI to make the whole thing up.

On January 1, a new Redditor with the username Trowaway_whistleblow posted for the first time. The title of their thread, on the subreddit r/LateStageCapitalism, was provocative: “I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The ‘Priority Fee’ and ‘Driver Benefit Fee’ go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it.”

The post itself included purportedly damning allegations about one of the food delivery apps. A screenshot of the post is below; in short, Trowaway_whistleblow wrote that they’re a backend engineer under a “massive NDA,” but they were compelled to tell all because they could no longer “sleep at night” knowing that they “helped build this machine.” Among their allegations: priority delivery orders are a scam, the unnamed food delivery company is skimming tips, and is utilizing a “desperation score” that “tracks how desperate [drivers] are for cash based on their acceptance behavior.”

A screenshot of the false, AI-generated Reddit thread.

Trowaway_whistleblow started the same thread in r/AMA and r/mildlyinfuriating, but didn’t get much traction. They did, however, go viral in r/confession, garnering more than 84,000 upvotes and 4,400 comments as of Sunday evening. Their allegations spread like wildfire on social media; a screenshot of the post, captioned “holy fucking shit,” got 205,000 likes on X.

The allegations in the Reddit thread are disturbing and, frankly, not very difficult to believe, given the ample, available reporting about the poor treatment of gig workers. Presumably, that’s why DoorDash CEO Tony Xu posted about the thread on X.

“This is not DoorDash, and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated the kind of culture described in this Reddit post,” Xu wrote. He added, “What’s described here is appalling, and if true, whoever is operating in this manner should be ashamed.”

But the allegations in the Reddit thread are not true. They are fabricated. The original post was generated by AI and was intended to defame Uber Eats. I know as much because I traded Signal messages with Trowaway_whistleblow, who additionally used AI to prepare a fake-but-sophisticated-looking “internal document” of other supposedly damning allegations; Trowaway_whistleblow circulated the document to journalists, hoping someone would take the bait and publish a libelous “scoop.”

In a statement to Hard Reset, Uber’s Head of Communications Matt Kallman vehemently denied the allegations contained in the AI-generated document, referring to them as “fabricated” and the document as “fake.” Kallman further wrote, “We do not do what’s alleged in the original Reddit post. It appears to all be an AI-generated scam.”

Here’s the full story, and why social media perusers and journalists (myself included!) should be vigilant about yet another form of AI-assisted misinformation.

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On January 2, Hard Reset’s digital director spotted Trowaway_whistleblow’s viral thread, and passed along my Signal username to Trowaway_whistleblow in case they wanted to talk to the media. Trowaway_whistleblow messaged me on the afternoon of January 3. I asked if Trowaway_whistleblow was up for an off-the-record call. I wanted to introduce myself, hear more about what they were up to, and get a better sense of what sort of corroborating evidence they might have to substantiate the claims in their Reddit post. They responded that they preferred to talk over text for the time being. Looking back, this was of course the first warning sign about their attempted scam. But on its own, it’s not unusual for skittish sources to want to text for a bit before talking on the phone with a journalist.

I kept the conversation going. They sent over a photo of a purported Uber Eats badge, with “senior software engineer” visible, but their name and face blacked out. I told them that I appreciated it, but in truth, the photo was useless. Casey Newton, who also corresponded with Trowaway_whistleblow, has since reported that the photo was flagged to him as AI-generated.

Maybe realizing they needed to up the ante, Trowaway_whistleblow sent over what they claimed were “internal company documents that would corroborate my points.” They attached a PDF that I fully admit fooled me on my first read. I’m not going to get into too many details, because the document is fabricated and libelous. I will say this: the document’s cover page cites a made-up group with a very similar name to a real product group at Uber. The document is watermarked as “confidential.” Its contents feature lots of corporate-speak euphemisms for delivery drivers that are alarming, but not necessarily fake-sounding. (To reiterate, they are fake! Not real!) The document basically explains how to rip off delivery drivers in order to maximize profits, with supplementary graphs and charts intended to make everything look more official.

As I read through, I sent Trowaway_whistleblow a series of questions. Their replies were short but seemingly useful. I told them the document reaffirmed lots of their Reddit thread, but that I would need more corroboration. Did Uber actually institute anything in the document? If so, when? They told me they were looking for more documentation to send along. As we exchanged a few more messages, I found Xu’s post, where on behalf of DoorDash he disavowed the allegations in Trowaway_whistleblow’s Reddit thread. And then I saw a number of responses to Xu that the Reddit post was clearly AI-generated.

Max Spero, the cofounder of AI detection service Pangram Labs, quoted Xu and wrote, “Doordash CEO forced to respond to a viral AI-generated post that: alleges massive levels of illegal misconduct, contains information that would dox the poster if it was real, gets easily verifiable facts wrong.” I’ve previously used Pangram in my reporting, and found it to be effective, so I plugged in the viral Reddit post. Sure enough, it came back 100% AI-generated.

I messaged Trowaway_whistleblow again. Had they seen the accusations that they generated their Reddit post with AI? They wrote back that AI detectors are not reliable, and sent a link to a Forbes article about how detectors don’t work. I was immediately much, much more suspicious.

Re-reading the Reddit post, Trowaway_whistleblow’s assertions that they’re under a “massive NDA” and writing from a “burner laptop” are silly. It was also odd how readily they shared a purportedly sensitive document. It takes time, and trust, for a source to pass along something that could get them in serious trouble. And as an engineering friend later texted me, if an employee shares a PDF of a work document, they’ll absolutely get caught, regardless of whether they use public wi-fi or a so-called “burner laptop.”

Hoping to keep the conversation going, I hedged about the AI detectors. Yes, sure, sometimes the detectors aren’t accurate. I transitioned: Did Trowaway_whistleblow know whether other journalists might have already reached out to Uber to confirm the authenticity of the “internal document?” Almost immediately, Trowaway_whistleblow deleted their account.

I called my Hard Reset colleague, Ariella Steinhorn, who for years worked with whistleblowers to help them tell their stories. She’s especially familiar with whistleblowers in the tech industry. By this point, I knew I’d need to send the document to Uber to confirm or deny its authenticity, so I shared it with Steinhorn. We read it over again. This time, I noticed more oddities, including how, at the end of the document, there are three listed “signatories” but no actual signatures—just printed company titles.

Steinhorn shared my skepticism about the veracity of Trowaway_whistleblow’s claims, but we were both at a loss about the why. This endeavor took a fair amount of work and effort. For what purpose, exactly? There are already so many fact-based critiques about food deliver apps and the companies that run them!

Was there any universe in which Trowaway_whistleblow’s story might still check out? Maybe, for instance, they’re not great at writing, and used Grammarly or ChatGPT to iron out their Reddit post. (In their viral thread, Trowaway_whistleblow claimed that English isn’t their first language.) It was a stretch, but worth seeing through—if the whole thing was indeed fraudulent, it would still be newsworthy.

We penned an email to Uber and sent them the full “internal document.” Uber responded within an hour. Kallman, Uber’s head of communications, denied everything in the Reddit thread and in the fake document. He went point-by-point over the terminology in the document, and said none of it is real. The document “includes names, systems and software that do not exist at Uber,” Kallman said. He was as definitive as you can be.

I separately ran the document through Pangram, and it was flagged as 100% AI-generated. My best theory is that Trowaway_whistleblow generated the contents of the fake document with an LLM, then compiled them with LaTeX, which is basically a formatting technology. LaTeX is listed in the metadata for the fraudulent document.

(Nerdy, brief aside: ChatGPT is trained to incorporate LaTeX when it’s creating a document, but then the “where from” metadata for the document will display as “ChatGPT”; presumably, Trowaway_whistleblow wanted to obscure ChatGPT from the metadata, hence my theory that they divided their fake-document creation process into two parts. I don’t know for sure though—they might have used a different LLM, or trained their own.)

In addition to deleting their Signal, Trowaway_whistleblow didn’t respond to follow-up inquiries on Reddit. They haven’t publicly commented since January 2, when they were still replying to Redditors. The readership on their falsified Reddit thread dwarfs the number of people who will ultimately read this entire article. As far as impressions go, the X post by Xu, DoorDash’s CEO, will also dwarf this article. Though Xu included an “if true” qualifier in his analysis of the Reddit thread, he also drew a convenient line in the sand. If the allegations are true, then they’re stemming from one of DoorDash’s competitors, not DoorDash.

A screenshot of DoorDash CEO Tony Xu’s post.

That doesn’t seem like a responsible post to keep up after you’ve been informed that the Reddit thread is completely false and part of a smear campaign. At the very least, you would think Xu’s post necessitates an addendum. With that context in mind, I reached out to DoorDash to ask if Xu plans on deleting his post, or issuing a correction/apology. A spokesperson wrote the following:

“Whether or not the post was fake, we wanted to combat misinformation and clarify that our approach at DoorDash is drastically different from what was described. We don’t see why a retraction would be warranted here—what we’ve said about the way we operate is true.”

As of Sunday night, r/confession hasn’t deleted Trowaway_whistleblow’s viral thread. And apparently, Xu’s post is staying up, too. You can concoct all sorts of plausible theories about Trowaway_whisteblow’s motives here. The only certainty is that their AI-assisted smear was highly successful—and that there will be many more AI-assisted scams of this variety very, very soon.