That viral Reddit post about food delivery apps was an AI scam

A viral Reddit confessional about a “major food delivery app” posted January 2nd is most likely AI-generated. The original post by user Trowaway_whistleblow alleged that an unnamed food delivery company regularly delays customer orders, calls couriers “human assets,” and exploits their “desperation” for cash, among other indefensible actions. Nearly 90,000 upvotes and four days later, it’s become increasingly clear that the post’s text is probably AI-generated.

Considering the delivery app industry track record of exploitation of its drivers, it’s easy to see why so many people believed this was the real thing.

The Verge put the original 586-word Reddit post through several free online AI detectors, in addition to Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The results were mixed: Copyleaks, GPTZero, Pangram, Gemini, and Claude all pegged it as likely AI-generated, but ZeroGPT and QuillBot both reported it as human-written. ChatGPT played it down the middle.

Reached by The Verge on Signal, Trowaway_whistleblow provided an image of an Uber Eats employee badge. That image was generated or edited with Google AI, according to Gemini. The image shows an Uber Eats logo above two black boxes, presumably covering an employee name and photo, and the words “senior software engineer.” It’s odd that an engineer’s badge would have the Uber Eats logo, and not the Uber logo, according to Gemini. That, in addition to slightly misaligned words and warped coloration at the edge of the green border, are reasons Gemini thinks it’s inauthentic. (Uber later confirmed that Uber Eats-branded employee badges do not exist.)

The Verge was not the only news outlet communicating with Trowaway_whistleblow. Casey Newton of Platformer and Hard Fork also received an employee badge photo, which Gemini flagged as AI.

Hard Reset, a Substack publication, reported that Trowaway_whistleblow gave reporter Alex Shultz a purportedly internal Uber document — but quickly deleted their Signal account once Shultz began pressing about the authenticity of the document. The Verge’s chat with Trowaway_whistleblow shows a message saying “This person isn’t using Signal.”

Uber denies the content of the Reddit post and the employee badge photo. “Not only are the claims fake, but they’re also dead wrong,” Uber spokesperson Noah Edwardsen told The Verge. Uber Eats’ Andrew Macdonald wrote on X, “This post is definitively not about us. I suspect it is completely made up. Don’t trust everything you read on the internet.”

And DoorDash CEO Tony Xu also denied the redditor’s “appalling” allegations in a post on X. “This is not DoorDash, and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated the kind of culture described in this Reddit post,” Xu wrote.

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