A blockbuster Reddit exposé about a food delivery app ripping off its drivers wasn’t written by a brave whistleblower. It was written by an AI.
The post, which hit Reddit’s front page, looked like textbook tech-worker catharsis. The author claimed to be an employee at a major food delivery company, drunk, hiding out in a public library to use the Wi-Fi, and finally ready to spill everything.
"You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories," the user wrote.
He alleged the company was exploiting legal loopholes to steal drivers’ tips and wages with impunity. Given that DoorDash was sued over tip-stealing and agreed to a $16.75 million settlement, the story felt plausible enough to pass the smell test.
Reddit certainly bought it. The post pulled in more than 87,000 upvotes and then jumped platforms, landing on X, where it racked up 208,000 likes and 36.8 million impressions.
Then Casey Newton got involved.
Newton, who runs the tech newsletter Platformer, reached out to the supposed whistleblower. The Redditor followed up on Signal and sent what looked like a photo of an UberEats employee badge plus an 18-page "internal document" describing how the company’s AI calculated a "desperation score" for each driver.
It was catnip for any reporter covering algorithmic labor. Dense, detailed, extremely on trend. And that was exactly the problem.
"For most of my career up until this point, the document shared with me by the whistleblower would have seemed highly credible in large part because it would have taken so long to put together," Newton wrote. "Who would take the time to put together a detailed, 18-page technical document about market dynamics just to troll a reporter? Who would go to the trouble of creating a fake badge?"
The answer, now, is: someone with access to generative AI.
As Newton tried to vet the source, things stopped adding up. He turned to Google’s Gemini and used Google’s SynthID watermarking tech to analyze the badge photo. SynthID is designed to survive everyday edits like cropping, compression and filtering. Gemini flagged the image as AI-generated.
The whistleblower wasn’t a whistleblower at all. He was running an AI hoax.
That kind of stunt used to be rare simply because it took too much time and effort. Writing an 18-page technical memo, designing a fake corporate badge, seeding posts across platforms — that was a serious project. Now it’s a weekend side quest for anyone with access to modern tools.
"AI slop on the internet has gotten a lot worse, and I think part of this is due to the increased use of LLMs, but other factors as well," Max Spero, founder of Pangram Labs, told TechCrunch. Pangram builds tools to detect AI-generated text.
Spero says it’s not just bored trolls doing this.
"There’s companies with millions in revenue that can pay for ‘organic engagement’ on Reddit, which is actually just that they’re going to try to go viral on Reddit with AI-generated posts that mention your brand name."
Pangram and similar tools can help flag synthetic text, but the picture gets murkier with multimedia. Generative models themselves often struggle to recognize AI-made images and video, and watermarking isn’t universal. Even when a fake is eventually debunked, it may have already rocketed through Reddit, X and TikTok.
That’s exactly what happened here: the fake whistleblower narrative got its viral moment before the fact-checks caught up.
The weirdest part? When TechCrunch’s editor heard about a "viral AI food delivery hoax that was on Reddit this weekend," she initially thought it was a different incident. There was more than one "viral AI food delivery hoax on Reddit this weekend."
So we’re all scrolling like detectives now, second-guessing screenshots, badges, PDFs and dramatic confessionals. The boring reality is that the next too-perfect whistleblower post may not be a worker risking their job. It may just be another prompt.
