Meghan McCarty Carino

Gary O'Keefe is our engineer.

Daisy Palacios is the supervising producer.

Nancy Fargali is the executive producer.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech.

This is APM.

It takes a lot to fool a tech reporter, but AI can get pretty close.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

Earlier this month, a post went viral on Reddit, supposedly written by a whistleblower at a food delivery app.

It alleged all kinds of sketchy behavior, like artificially slowing delivery times to push customers to upgrade.

Reporter Casey Newton at Platformer decided to check it out.

He started by asking the author to verify his identity and received a photo of an official looking employee badge.

Why was it so crazy?

Yeah.

So at what point did this really start to kind of break down for you?

So it sounds like a lot really hinged on the fact that Google actually embeds this kind of, you know, watermark in its AI image outputs.

We'll be right back.

You're listening to Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

We're back with Casey Newton, reporter at the newsletter Platformer.