A viral Reddit post about food delivery apps being an AI scam

A Reddit viral confession About “Major Food Delivery App” to publish January 2nd was likely generated by artificial intelligence. The original post by user Trowaway_whistleblow alleged that an unnamed food delivery company regularly delayed customers’ orders, called couriers “human assets,” and exploited their “desperation” for money, among other indefensible actions. Nearly 90,000 votes and four days later, it is becoming increasingly clear that the text of the post may have been generated by artificial intelligence.

Edge The original 586-word Reddit post put it through several free online AI detection tools, as well as Gemini, ChatGPT, and Cloud. The results were mixed: Copyleaks, GPTZero, Pangram, Gemini, and Claude all pegged them as being AI-made, but ZeroGPT and QuillBot reported them as human-written. ChatGPT ran it in the middle.

Accessed by Edge On Signal, Trowaway_whistleblow provided an image of an Uber Eats employee badge. That image was created or edited using Google AI, according to Gemini. The image shows the Uber Eats logo above two black boxes, presumably covering the employee’s name and photo, and the words “Senior Software Engineer.” Oddly enough, the engineer’s badge bears the Uber Eats logo, not the Uber logo, according to Gemini. This, combined with the slightly skewed words and distorted colors on the edge of the green border, are the reasons why Gemini might think it’s not authentic. (Uber later confirmed that Uber Eats-branded employee badges do not exist.)

Edge Trowaway_whistleblow wasn’t the only news outlet to reach out. Casey Newton Platform and Hard fork also receive Image of an employee badge, marked by Gemini AI.

Hard reset,Substack publication, I mentioned That Trowaway_whistleblow gave reporter Alex Shultz an alleged internal Uber document — but quickly deleted his Signal account once Shultz started pressing about the authenticity of the document. EdgeA conversation with Trowaway_whistleblow shows a message saying “This person is not using Signal.”

Uber denies the content of the Reddit post and the employee badge image. “Not only are these claims false, they are completely false,” said Noah Edwardsen, an Uber spokesman. Edge. Andrew MacDonald of Uber Eats books On X, “This post is definitely not about us. I suspect it’s completely made up. Don’t trust everything you read on the Internet.”

And DoorDash CEO Tony Shaw, too to reject The Redditor made the “horrific” claims in a post on X. “This is not DoorDash, and I will fire anyone who promotes or tolerates the kind of culture described in this Reddit post,” Xu wrote.