Sam Altman Breaks Down Why Reddit and X Are Starting to Feel Fake
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently shared a concern that’s probably crossed all of our minds: social media is starting to feel… fake. He was browsing posts on r/ClaudeCode, a Reddit community where people talk about OpenAI’s programming tool Codex, and he realized it’s hard to tell who’s actually human.
ALSO READ: Why Millennials and Gen Z Are So Obsessed with Dot & Key
Human Or AI?
“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 wrote on X (formerly Twitter). Basically, even he couldn’t tell if the posts were legit.
Sam Altman pointed out a bunch of reasons for this. People online are picking up quirks from AI speech, communities amplify certain opinions, algorithms push engagement, creators are trying to monetize everything, and of course—bots. The bigger picture? Humans are starting to sound like AI, and that’s making everything feel off.
He summed it up: “AI Twitter/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn’t a year or two ago.”
And he isn’t exaggerating. Reports say that over half of all online traffic in 2024 came from non-humans, mostly AI. On X alone, the bot Grok estimates there are hundreds of millions of automated accounts.
Even on Reddit, reactions to AI aren’t always positive. After the launch of GPT-5, some users criticized updates instead of praising them, showing that conversations about AI are complicated now.