OpenAI co-founder and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman shared a blunt realization this week: social media may no longer feel human.
Altman posted on X that while reading through the r/Claudecode subreddit, where users had been praising OpenAI’s Codex software, a rival to Anthropic’s Claude Code, he began to assume the posts were fake. “I assume it’s all fake/bots, even though in this case I know Codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real,” he admitted.
The subreddit has been flooded with migration posts from users claiming to have switched to Codex, prompting one Redditor to joke: “Is it possible to switch to Codex without posting a topic on Reddit?”
Altman then broke down why online spaces feel artificial. He cited quirks of “LLM-speak” adopted by real people, herd behavior among Extremely Online users, social media’s push toward engagement, creator monetization incentives, past cases of corporate astroturfing, and yes, the presence of bots.
That irony wasn’t lost: OpenAI itself trained its language models on Reddit data, and Altman was a Reddit board member until 2022. Now, he suggests humans are starting to sound like the very models designed to mimic them.
Altman also noted that pro-OpenAI posts may be mistaken for inauthentic activity because of prior astroturfing campaigns in the AI sector. While there’s no direct evidence of astroturfing here, OpenAI subreddits did sour after the rocky GPT-5 rollout, where angry users accused the model of being buggy, personality-shifted, and resource-hungry. Altman hosted a Reddit AMA afterward, but community sentiment has remained mixed.
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The broader problem: social media increasingly feels “fake.” Data backs that up. Imperva reported that more than half of internet traffic in 2024 was non-human, much of it driven by LLMs. Meanwhile, X itself acknowledged bot issues, with estimates suggesting hundreds of millions of accounts could be automated.
Some observers think Altman’s comments may hint at OpenAI’s rumored social media project, first reported in April by The Verge. Whether or not such a platform exists, Altman has highlighted a real dilemma: the erosion of authenticity online.
Even if a new network claimed to be bot-free, the distinction between humans and LLMs may no longer matter. As one University of Amsterdam experiment showed, when researchers built a social network made entirely of bots, the bots quickly formed their own cliques and echo chambers, just like people.
