I Trust Reddit for Real Human Answers. AI Slop Is Killing That
As AI-generated content creeps into every corner of the internet, Reddit bills itself as a haven for human-generated content, not slop churned out by a chatbot, but the tides may be turning.The platform is steadily filling up with AI-generated posts posing as original thoughts from human users. One study estimates that 15% of content posted on Reddit in 2025 was generated by AI. When Platformer's Casey Newton tried to verify a Reddit post with millions of views, the author sent him AI-generated materials that, in turn, proved the entire account was false. The same thing happened to me when I tried to verify a post about someone whose child supposedly took their credit card and spent $19,000 on Roblox. The poster originally agreed to a video chat but quickly cancelled. When I followed up a few weeks later, the account had been banned.Most Redditors don't go to the lengths a journalist might to verify stories, and they shouldn't have to. But as someone who does it regularly, I can tell you it's not looking good. Sadly, browsing on Reddit now requires a healthy dose of skepticism about what you're reading. Reddit's leadership seems to think the site is immune to the wider AI slopfest, and bills its human-generated content as the secret to financial success (Q4 revenue grew 70%) and "turning Reddit’s authenticity into even more everyday utility," says CEO Steve Huffman.Reddit CEO Jen Wong doubled down on the authenticity messaging in an interview with the BBC. "I do think that in a world of AI...people recognize that what Reddit offers stands out more," she says. "The internet has become a place that maybe isn't all that human in authenticity, which was maybe the original promise… but Reddit has preserved that."This image of authenticity underpins lucrative licensing deals with OpenAI and Google, giving them permission to surface user posts in their chatbots and search results. At an OpenAI press event I attended in the fall, a company spokesperson said the AI model prioritizes Reddit posts in answers because their market research shows people trust Reddit the most. (Trust in the press, on the other hand, is bottoming out, according to Pew Research.) But now, AI posts are finding their way to Reddit. Bots are nothing new for the platform, nor is misinformation, but what is new is the ease with which anyone can spin up a crazy, compelling AI story, post it on the site for a thrill, and watch the upvotes pour in. Other motives might include activism, driving traffic to a certain website or product, or a desire to build an influential persona on Reddit. A more sinister motive could be nation-states or groups looking to seed chatbots with propaganda and influence entire populations, like those linked to Russia.Other social media sites are also seeing an influx of AI-generated (or AI-adjacent) posts. A recent viral post on X, ironically about AI disruption, came from a programmer who admitted that while "these are 100% my thoughts... AI helped organize them and improved my writing." A close inspection made that obvious, with some hallmarks of AI-generated content, such as frequent line breaks and hyphens.Most of us want Reddit—and the rest of the web—to remain a reliable source of accurate, authentic information. But as Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri put it in a January post, social media sites need to find new ways to distinguish human-generated thoughts from AI content, which is only going to get harder as models improve and AI gets better at mimicking us.
