Meghan McCarty Carino

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.

Deception online is certainly nothing new, but what struck you about this experience?

Part of what stands out about this scenario is just kind of how low stakes it is.

Like, the idea that someone would go to the effort to... I mean, at least, you know, in kind of the pre-AI era to fake something for...

motivation that seems very unclear like you're getting up votes on reddit or something like it's just very in the before ai times it was just very that would seem like a very odd scenario that would not necessarily inspire a lot of skepticism like why would someone do that

But you do write that this, you know, this is a way that AI tools are making your job as a journalist harder.

I mean, we often talk about AI increasing productivity, but there are many instances like this where AI is just kind of creating this pointless busy work for people.