Casey Newton

I think we should never underestimate what people will do for clout online.

Sometimes I feel like our entire world is just run by people who are trying to get retweets.

But the larger point here is that we don't actually know what the motivation was for this person, right?

Right.

Some people have speculated, hey, maybe they were some kind of a short seller in the market and they were hoping to tank the Uber stock so that they could make a quick profit.

Maybe it was just a bored teenager.

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.