Casey Newton debunks viral Reddit hoax accusing Uber and DoorDash of manipulating delivery speeds — and reflects on AI-generated disinformation

into the whistleblower, the Reddit, uh, the AI food delivery story. We're having him join the show. We're very excited to be joined by Casey. How are you doing, Casey?

Welcome.

Welcome to the show.

Hey, guys. Long time. First time. Nice to see you.

Thanks so much for hopping on short notice.

What a moment. So great to have you. absolute scoop of the century. Incredible story. Uh I was riveted reading it. Uh thank you so much for the hard work.

Going to this the scoop hall of fame.

Scoop hall of fame. I think I don't even know if this is a scoop. This is more investigative journalism cuz this peeling back onion. I don't know. It was great. But uh but how did you did you see this go out on social media? Were you on Reddit? Like how did you encounter this story first?

That's exactly right. Believe it or not, I first saw the screenshot on threads with somebody saying like, "Look how evil the food delivery companies are." And, you know, I was like a few days from having to come back and write a column again, and I thought, "Hey, maybe this turns into a scoop for me." So, I was super bummed when the whole thing fell apart. But then it was actually my boyfriend who said people might actually be more interested to know about how the whole thing fell apart. I think he was right about that.

So, so what was the process like to actually dig into it? What was your interpretation? Because we read the Reddit post. I saw the screenshot and I was kind of like and people were going back and forth, is it AI generated? Blah blah blah. It didn't feel AI generated to me, but there were some red flags in there like being drunk at a library seemed weird and and he said something there was some other element in there that was like very very odd to me. I forget exactly what he said, but uh

some people are like pointing out the M dashes that were in there. And you know, this is one of those where like the moment that that everyone knows it's a hoax, everybody knew it was a hoax from the first word. You know what I mean? Like everybody figured it out before I did, but that that's fine. The truth is I didn't figure it out right away. I did think it seemed plausible. Like we both know that Uber and uh Door Dash have been caught doing some pretty shady things over the years. So, I thought it was at worst it was at least worth messaging the guy and seeing what he could tell me about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh

wait, so did you message him on Reddit?

I did. And I sort of assumed that, you know, by that point the post had like I don't know 80,000 up votes. I thought there's no way I'm ever going to hear back from this guy. but instead he messages me back within 9 minutes which again in retrospect was probably a tell that maybe there was something fishy going on here. But yeah, he was happy to get on Signal. He did sort of strangely only give one or two word answers. Like I was expecting him to, you know, be a little bit more verbose based on the post. Again, another red flag in retrospect. But, you know, I've talked to a lot of sources like this over the years and initially a lot of them are pretty skittish. They don't know you. They don't have any reason to trust you. You kind of have to build up that trust over time. Uh but, you know, with with Sohan Periq. He came on and he was just like,

"Yeah, I worked for five companies at once." [laughter] Wasn't skittish at all. Immediately immediately admitted to uh doing something really bad. [laughter]

It was a very odd moment. Yeah. the the thing that stuck out to me in here was uh he he claims that uh that the that the speed up fee uh what is it is psychological value ad but then so he says it does nothing to speed you up but then in the next paragraph he says that that in fact they're slowing down all the other orders which again so you are getting so you are getting a speed up so it's not logic it wasn't logically consistent to me which was a little odd that was more of a red flag than any of like the it's an AI generated text and I want your reaction to this Because if you were a whistleblower and you and you're writing something and you're worried that your boss is going to be able to clock your writing style, it doesn't seem crazy to me to pass your your testimony through ChatGpt and just say, "Hey, rewrite this like it's, you know, GPT5 because then yes, it will have m dashes. Yes, it will have telltale AI generated things, but the points will stand, the facts will stand, and then you'll be more anonymized." So, do you think there's anything to that? Sure. I mean, this is a lot of what the job is now of being a reporter, particularly in tech where we're working with really savvy companies, you know, like I've reported a lot about Meta. They have former CIA agents over there who are doing uh, you know, investigations of leaks like this. So, we have to spend a lot of our time trying to do OBSSE with our sources. So, yeah, if the source said, "Hey, I might run this through an LLM to sort of take the stink of me off it," I would say go for it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So,

okay. So you message this guy, he responds, he starts sending you proof. What kind of proof is he sharing? How did you process that?

Yeah. So the first thing that you know I'm obviously I want to know his name. He's not comfortable sharing that at first. He says, um, I could send you an employee badge with my face and name blurred out. And, you know, in in this line of work, it's you kind of just want to keep them talking, right? Like see what they'll share. It'll all sort of add up to something over time. So I said, "Sure, let's see it." He sends over a badge. Uh I don't know if you're able to sort of show it on the screen. I have a new funny story about it, but basically it says that, you know, it's an Uber Eats badge. Um I learned today from a reporter at NBC News that she had sent him her employee badge and he appears to have used that as the basis for this and said, "Transformed this image into an Uber Eats badge." I've now seen her original image and he literally just must have put it in Nano Banana and said, "Turn this into Uber Eats." Yeah, that's super interesting because I was looking at the actual image being like, are there any telltale signs? I'm like pretty good at clocking little things, but Nano Banana really is good at like leaving enough of the original image that you don't get any of those weird

feel things to make it look like an iPhone photo anyways.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Totally. The the tell, by the way, I've heard from some uh former Uber folks today, and the tell that they wanted me to know is that there are not actually Uber Eats

bad. That's the other thing I was going to say. You just It's Uber. It's it's not a separate company. Why would why would you have a separate [laughter]

is a little bit of a

badge and and then you got and then there was some internal document that you got as well. What was up with that?

Yeah. So, this honestly wound up being the most interesting thing to me was that I had said, look, is there anything you could do to corroborate your story? And he was like, well, I'm sort of uncomfortable with that, but let me see what I can do. He disappears for a full day and then comes back the following morning. This is Sunday morning. And says, does this work? And it's an 18page document that presents itself as a sort of highly technical overview of how they built the system that sort of uh takes advantage of drivers desperation.

Mhm. Okay. So, what's the who what's your theory on who this person is? What's the point? Because in some ways in some ways like I feel like Door Dash was the loser here because I feel like Door Dash has a reputation for just like being incredible ruthless operators and so people are just like oh this is Door Dash for sure and then and then and then they had to come out and defend themselves and say we don't even use this language. There's probably like some fourth tier like the fourth player in the ecosystem that we don't even know is like languishing at like $400 million market cap and they're like we we're trying to be as ruthless as them man like trust us like our profit's going to be great next quarter and we're like no one thinks it's you. No one thinks.

Yeah. I just I just don't understand the point. Is this is this could be a short seller? Could be a disgruntled driver. Did you get any any any interest or any ideas of what this could be? Like why are people doing this? So I mean again like this guy like his his answers are so short that I never really got any sense of motivation. I you know I do think like this was over the holiday break. I do think that there's a chance that this is like a bore teenager you know in in a basement type of thing. But I think you know one thing I haven't done and I would encourage people to do is like were there any poly market or couchy trades around the time of this post dropping like because it would be crazy to me if somebody was trying to like tank the Uber or door uh Door Dash market cap and you know make a few bucks. Okay. Yeah. I mean, they could do that in the public markets or or I guess in prediction markets or or or maybe because sometimes there's like a dedicated prediction market for this specific thing like is it real or not and then they could be trading that because they know it's fake or something. Um what what what do you think the uh the actual platform should have done? I mean Door Dash was very they they did the founder comms, they did the corporate coms, they did a they did a number of things. Do you think they handled it well? Is there something that they should be doing with journalists when something like this happens to like not put their finger on the scale too much but be open with you? Like how should they respond?

I think they did the right thing. They they both came forward and they just said like this is categorically false. You know the Uber com said like this is a fake document. You know they really just sort of like went all in. They put their credibility on the line and you know often corporate comms are a lot more measured but with this one they were just very confident in knowing that this did not come from them and so there was no reason not to just lead with that. Yeah. Yeah. Uh where else are you seeing uh interesting like AI fake news stories pop up? I've been there's this interesting irony that I mean I don't know where you stand on like the water issue but it feels like the electricity issue is something that people should be talking about and the water issue is maybe way less important and yet like AI has created this like somewhat fake narrative about itself that it's like a victim of it but it's not fully AI generated but there's just a weird like paradox there where people seem to be distracted. I mean, to me, the thread that ties all those together is that AI is a superpower for motivated reasoning. Like, if there is something you want to believe, like AI can immediately generate the materials that will help you sell that case to other people. And, you know, we're all just going to kind of have to like upgrade our cognitive hygiene and say, we now know that there are tools that can get me to sort of believe my own eyes when I shouldn't be doing that. And um, you know, it's it's it's screwing with my mind. That's why I wrote this piece. Like this whole thing is screwing with my mind and I I want all of us to be having a conversation about it.

Yeah. There there was a very interesting thread just like two weeks earlier maybe about uh someone claimed to have delivered a Door Dash delivery, but they just generated an image of the person's front door or something which I guess they got that image from Street View or something. And that feels like a fraud that would you make you like $10 and then you'd get deplatformed. [laughter] But uh but but it is weird that like uh I mean Rune was posting that uh hopefully Door Dash will be the first major company incentivized to build a reliable deep fake detector. Very doable though it will become a red queen race and hopefully licensed out technology. I never would have picked Door Dash as the company to do. I would have thought YouTube or Instagram but [laughter] I don't know I don't know if you've seen anything else going on in this uh companies. So, so do do you think that uh this post even though it was fake ends up creating any type of change in terms of how these platforms have are operating? Because it seems like right now that you have kind of like from my view is like actually like as these platforms have saturated and everybody uses them whether they're you know using them to earn a living or or supplement their income or they're using them as a consumer. Everybody seems to be like frustrated with the platforms. Is that just the enduring state of delivery products where people and and maybe it's solved through robotics where eventually these platforms say like we heard that you hate working on our on our platform and the good news is that you don't have to anymore because we have drones and and you know little little uh toy cars driving around. But but where do how do you think the the if anything anything in the industry changes over the next kind of year?

It it's a good question. It's a big question. I think that anytime you feel dependent on a platform, you come to resent it. And people do feel dependent on Uber Eats and Door Dash to bring them their dinner, particularly, you know, if you're living in Silicon Valley and ordering from them like three or four times a week. Um, you know, I think one reason why the fake resonated was that it was so easy to believe a delivery platform would want to figure out how to pay their drivers less. We've seen them do it in other real ways in the past. And so my hope is that if there's any change here, uh, it is that these companies now realize, look, if if you truly build an exploitative system for your drivers, there will be a backlash and people will turn against you. So that would be my hope coming out of it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Odd odd vibes for sure. Um, yeah. uh what I'm interested to know about your process using AI tools as a journalist. I feel like the [clears throat] hallucination uh incidents has definitely gone down like it just in terms of like if you just need a fact or you just need to know what's the biggest company in the world like these are good knowledge retrieval tools but obviously you have a very high bar for uh what is factually accurate in what you're printing. uh what is your process for when you need to maybe not hunt down a specific fact in a story but you need to corroborate it with you know you're just looking up a whole bunch of extra context around how Door Dash operates is Uber Eats a wholly owned subsidiary all of these different things like would there be a badge like how how are you using AI tools in your day day-to-day

absolutely so I think that I probably use AI tools maybe more than the average reporter like I feel like I understand the ways in which that I can trust them I'm happy to turn to them and say hey give me an overview about this industry that I haven't written about very much. The reason that I'm comfortable is that I'm using bots that site their sources and you know as a longtime journalist I know which sources I can trust. So uh I'm happy to do that. The other thing that I do is I'll sort of go out and you know get my own facts for the columns that I'm writing but then I'll feed them into chat GPT I find is really good at this and just say hey fact check this for me. It does a really great job of catching my mistakes all the time. That was not true a year ago by the way. So that's one of the places where I felt the most AI progress in is in using these things as fact checkers. Don't let them write the column, but absolutely let them try to catch your mistakes because in my experience they will.

Yeah. Do you agree with this idea that for what you do, uh the writing, the instantiation is not the hard part.

Um [laughter] well, how do you mean that? Because there's a lot of like days where I'm on deadline where the writing absolutely is.

Oh, really? Okay. Because so so what I've heard is that is that it's the you know it's the it's the ideas inside it's the facts it's the scoop it's the it's the information that you spend you know seven hours and then when it's time to go type it up and file uh yeah you kind of know the phrasing you know how to write and and sure you might dictate a little bit but like you're not just going to catch and say write a column.

No I'm not and like honestly like even if I wanted to do that I still think that they're not great at it. Although I will say the most recent version of Claude when I gave it this test was like good at mimicking my individual style in a way that sort of freaked me out a bit. But I just think that like at least my readers like they want to know what I'm thinking and if I delegate that job to a chatbot they're probably just not going to want to pay me.

Yeah. I [clears throat] also think people are uh surpris readers are surprisingly open to like the rough edges. like they they actually don't necessarily need everything to be in the super consistent style guide that you would get from enforcing an LLM on top of everything you published. Uh and if you use parenthesis one time and then quotes another time or brackets another like it just doesn't really matter. It actually gives more flavor and texture to the writing and so people are open to that. I don't know.

Yeah. I think like readers tend to be really forgiving when you tell them what you're doing and like if they hate something listen to them. Like there was a time when I was illustrating my columns with AI generated images because I thought it was like cool to have the superpower to do that. So many readers were like, "Please stop doing this. We hate this slop." And I was like, "All right, like we're in this together. I'm going to stop doing this."

Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Uh yeah, there's been there's been all sorts of like Yeah. It really depends on like the community that you're building, what how how uh like respected uh that

Do you think you'll ever come back to X? M

guys, it's a it's now just like a cam generator and notification app. Like what are we doing here? Do you remember how bad people got at Cambridge Analytica? Like what? Literally, what are we doing here? [laughter and gasps]

Mute mute all that and then hang out for the Andre Carpathy post. You know, there's some good stuff. You know,

there's some diamonds post are great.

Yeah, you you got to you got to really hone it in on the AI researchers who are still hanging out there. That

we Yeah, you have to accept that. You have to accept that you're getting engagement farmed. I think Nikita shared earlier that that like that all the the highest engagement days of ex history have all been in the last week. Part of that is like the the Maduro

story, but uh

yeah,

still.

Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on.

Great to finally have you on and uh anytime anytime you have a story, give us a

where can people find you? Uh give us the landscape of the of the Casey Newton Empire.

It's very simple. Oh, you can just go to platform.news. You can find this story and I also co-host the Hardfor podcast. And why don't you head over to youtube.com/hardfor. Check that out too.

There we go. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest of you guys.

Cheers.

We'll talk to you soon.

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So, it's good to see you [applause]