OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has raised concerns about the growing lack of authenticity on social media, saying that online platforms increasingly feel “fake” as bots and humans begin to sound alike. His remarks came after he noticed a flood of similar posts on the r/Claudecode subreddit, where users were praising OpenAI’s Codex programming tool, launched earlier this year as a competitor to Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Altman pointed out that the subreddit was so full of user testimonies about switching to Codex that one Redditor even joked about it being impossible to make the switch without posting. While acknowledging that Codex has been seeing strong growth, Altman admitted that the posts made him wonder whether they were written by people or bots.
He later shared a live breakdown of his thoughts, saying that many users now adopt a style of writing similar to “LLM-speak,” a term referring to the way large language models communicate. He added that online communities often move in synchronized patterns, hype cycles swing from extreme excitement to criticism, and past astroturfing campaigns by companies have made him more suspicious. Bots, he suggested, also play a role in shaping conversations.
Ironically, Altman noted that humans themselves are starting to sound like AI models. This is particularly striking since OpenAI’s own systems were trained in part on Reddit conversations, a platform where Altman once served as a board member and later became a major shareholder during its IPO.
Altman also warned that social media fandoms can easily become echo chambers, shifting between strong enthusiasm and hostility. His comments highlight a growing challenge of the digital age: as AI becomes more common in online spaces, telling the difference between real and synthetic voices is becoming harder than ever.
