Chapter 1: What are the challenges of verifying AI-generated content?
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.
Yeah. So he sent that over and said, I hope this suffices. His photo and name had been blacked out. But I thought, well, this is at least a starting point. I asked then if there was any document that he might have that would speak to his actual allegations. And while he complained that that might put him at additional risk, he said he would think about it.
And about a day later, he messaged me again on Signal and said, I have something for you. And it was an 18-page document that is probably the craziest thing a source has ever shared with me.
Why was it so crazy?
Well, one was that as I read through it, it seemed to verify not just a handful of allegations, but essentially every single thing in the post. It was presented as a kind of research paper that had been done by a behavioral economics group inside the company, which he was saying that this was coming from Uber.
And it said that, oh, yeah, you know, here's how we are calculating the desperation score. And here's what we're doing to, you know, slow down the deliveries for the customers that aren't paying. And, you know, in hindsight, it probably should have been a red flag that I was reading a description of almost cartoon villainy.
Yeah. So at what point did this really start to kind of break down for you?
Yeah, well, again, there was that moment of this is all seeming to be too good to be true. And I thought, well, let me see if I have any tools at my disposal that I can use. And so I know that a lot of the AI image generators embed these digital watermarks in the image that are designed to be useful in exactly cases like this.
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Chapter 2: How did Casey Newton investigate the AI hoax?
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?
Well, one reason why I was initially inclined to believe this source was that in the past, it would have taken a monumental effort to generate 18 pages and a fake employee badge, right? In fact, after I published my story, I heard from a reporter at NBC News who had also been messaging with the same source. And she shared her employee badge with me from NBC.
And it was almost identical to the one that he had shared with me. So we now believe that he had just taken her employee badge, which she had sort of shared with him as a kind of good faith effort to build trust, fed that into Gemini and said, turn this into an Uber Eats badge. And within seconds, he had it. So it is just that easy. It did not used to be.
And I think we as reporters and people who are consuming the news need to kind of catch up.
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
Yeah, completely. 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
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Chapter 3: What evidence suggested the story might be true?
That was Casey Newton at Platformer. Nicholas Guillaume produced this episode. I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM.