OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Monday that people may have picked up AI’s quirks and are starting to sound like large language models on social media.
Altman wrote in a post on X that he had the “strangest experience” looking at the flurry of online forum posts about Codex, OpenAI’s new agent tool for developers.
“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,” Altman said on X.
Representatives for Altman at OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Altman posited a few reasons for the surge in such content on social media. He said similarities in writing style could be cropping up because “real people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak.” Altman added that the “Extremely Online crowd drifts together in very correlated ways.”
Another reason suggested by Altman was that the nature of the hype cycle around AI tools “has a very ‘it’s so over/we’re so back’ extremism.” The rise of such content could be driven by “optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement and the related way that creator monetization works,” he continued.
“But the net effect is somehow AI twitter/AI reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn’t a year or two ago,” Altman wrote.
Altman made a similar observation in an X post he published last week.
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“I never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now,” Altman wrote in a post on Wednesday.
Paul Graham, the cofounder of startup incubator Y Combinator, responded to Altman’s post, saying that he noticed the same trend when he used X.
Graham said AI-generated content wasn’t just coming from “fake accounts run by groups and countries that want to influence public opinion,” it was also being published by “a lot of individual would-be influencers.”
Altman and Graham aren’t the only ones sensing a rise in “AI slop,” low-quality content made with little effort using AI, on the internet.
Substack CEO Chris Best said in an episode of “The a16z Podcast,” which aired last week, that “sophisticated AI goon bots” will saturate the media landscape with engagement bait.
“We’re going to live in a world where you could have a bunch of AI slop that keeps dumb people clicking,” Best said.
