Has Sam Altman been engaging with ChatGPT too much, or has he distanced himself from his delusion-inducing chatbot and gained some clarity?
We wonder because the person who introduced the Automated Soulless Text Machine to the world is now realizing that the internet feels increasingly inauthentic, sharing his observations once more on X-formerly-Twitter, apparently puzzled by how things reached this point.
His recent reflection was triggered by a screenshot shared by another user, displaying several enthusiastic posts on a Reddit forum dedicated to Claude Code, the AI coding assistant from OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic.
“I have had the strangest experience reading this: 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 wrote in a tweet.
He believes it’s not only AI spam causing this impression, but that people themselves are starting to write like the chatbots they’re increasingly attached to.
“Real people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak,” Altman noted. Additionally, he cited the extreme back and forth of the hype cycle, “optimization pressure from social platforms on boosting engagement,” and, inevitably, bots as factors.
“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 concluded.
There’s much to unpack here, particularly Altman’s immediate reaction upon witnessing a competitor receiving praise — genuine or not — which is to assume it’s false. Undoubtedly, the internet is becoming more artificial under corporate control and an influx of bots. Users too, to some extent, adopt influencer-like self-awareness.
However, most notable is Altman’s failure to acknowledge the elephant in the room: his pivotal role in advancing the technology driving this change. It’s akin to the Spotify CEO bemoaning excessive music streaming over traditional CD listening — something Daniel Ek, despite his often clueless comments and misguided views, hasn’t done. If this isn’t how Altman envisions his trillion-dollar technology being used, what should its purpose be? To spend an hour ordering cupcakes?
Amusingly, Altman seems to have only recently recognized this issue. Last week, he confessed he started to empathize with the “dead internet theory” after noticing “there are really a lot of LLM-run Twitter accounts now.”
The dead internet, as a side note, is a conspiracy theory suggesting the web is primarily operated by AI models and other autonomous machines, making most online interactions mere bot-generated illusions. While this isn’t factually accurate, it serves as shorthand for identifying evident cases of social media’s growing artificial nature, akin to viral nonsense posts with content-irrelevant replies. Or, say, Shrimp Jesus.
The reality is, those entrenched in the online world realized this years ago, and Altman, after accelerating the phenomenon with ChatGPT, is only now acknowledging it.
“The architect of the dead internet is a captain of the obvious,” one Reddit user observed.
More on OpenAI: GPT-5 Is Making Huge Factual Errors, Users Say.
