AI
Sam Altman says social media is just bots talking to bots
The irony: Sam Altman’s company develops the AI that is supposed to talk like human beings.
Sam Altman recently found himself skeptical online, wondering if social media is so filled with bots that one can’t be certain the people who post are even human.
The thought came to him as he was scrolling through the subreddit r/ClaudeCode, one that was at one point dedicated to Anthropic’s Claude Code but is now filled with threads from others that they’ve switched over to OpenAI’s Codex.
There were so many announcements that they’d done so that some people joked, saying, “Can you switch over to Codex without posting the move here?”
Altman admitted that he just couldn’t imagine that these posts were from real people. “Assume it’s all fake/bots,” he tweeted on X, then went off on a side trail about how the internet just doesn’t feel as real.
He pointed specifically at the combination of factors: people writing like AI voices, users emulating other people’s style, the online drama cycles that just keep repeating themselves, platforms optimizing for engagement, and, of course, bots.
It’s ironic, because Altman’s company develops the AI that is supposed to talk like human beings.
OpenAI’s models were actually trained on Reddit, on which Altman at one point sat on the board, so in some respect, the problems come full circle.
However, his concern is a little more than justified. The social networks have long wrestled with copycatting, online feuds, and fake grass-roots campaigns.
Altman even confirmed OpenAI has been the target of the latter. When OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.0, there was more criticism than acclaim from the Reddit community, and Altman’s failed bid at AMA via Reddit did nothing to dissipate the controversy.
The bigger issue is that bots may well already be the majority of the internet. Imperva in 2024 reported that over half the traffic online was from non-human origins.
Grok, X’s AI, even estimates there are hundreds of millions of bots on the site.
Others think that Altman’s words were more than fretting but also a way of hinting at the promise of an OpenAI social network.
However, whatever his motive, his broader argument holds true: social media is getting less human, and that is perhaps because people and machines are becoming increasingly indistinguishable.
Is Sam Altman right that social media has become mostly bots talking to bots, or is this just convenient blame-shifting from the company that helped create more convincing AI? Should we be more concerned about the authenticity crisis online, or is this just the natural evolution of how people communicate in the digital age? Tell us below in the comments, or reach us via our Twitter or Facebook.
