Casey Newton

Maybe it was someone in a foreign state that was trying to understand how Reddit might be manipulated so that eventually they could run...

an information operation of some kind so there are many possibilities here but ultimately unfortunately i don't know because uh after i you know confronted him about the hoax he was trying to pull he did delete his signal account how long did it take you to sort of unspool all of this it honestly only took me a few hours across a couple of days so in that sense i did get off a little lightly here

Absolutely.

And you know, in fact, the following day, I had gotten a message from another source that was sort of very much like this one.

This was a new source, someone who I had not worked with before, who had information that they wanted to share about one of the big AI labs.

And they sent it over and they had a whole slide presentation to share with me.

And it looked very realistic.

But of course, I'm thinking the whole time, is this person also just trying to run a hoax on me?

So I think we do just have to have that in the back of our heads.

And you know, arguably, we should

Always should have had that in the back of our heads.

You know, journalism is a business where we like to say, if your mother says she loves you, check it out.

But man, it is very hard to start to disbelieve your own eyes.

And I do think that that is what AI, in many cases, now requires of us.

The number one thing that I recommend to people is that when you see something online that you feel making you very angry and very outraged, that is the point where you want to be the most skeptical, right?

Because often the things that make us feel that way are confirming something that we want to believe, right?

And they're going to make us go out and they're going to make us post online.

And if someone can get us to do all of those things, then we are serving their interest, right?

So, you know, in the future, as I see other things like that, and as other people do, man, when you feel that feeling of, ah, I can feel I'm really supposed to be getting upset here, that is the moment to try to apply some skepticism and maybe don't believe the first source you see about it, right?

Go check and see if another newspaper has written about it.