this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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I'd gotten really good at discerning a chatGPT bot from a human account just from years of catching bots on Reddit.
There's a lot of red flags and tells that would be very hard to completely eradicate. There will always be an uncanny valley.
You think you have - but there’s really no way of knowing.
Just because someone writes like a bot doesn’t mean they actually are one. Feeling like "you’ve caught one" doesn’t mean you did - it just means you think you did. You might have been wrong, but you never got confirmation to know for sure, so you have no real basis for judging how good your detection rate actually is. It’s effectively begging the question - using your original assumption as "proof" without actual verification.
And then there’s the classic toupee fallacy: "All toupees look fake - I’ve never seen one that didn’t." That just means you’re good at spotting bad toupees. You can’t generalize from that and claim you’re good at detecting toupees in general, because all the good ones slip right past you unnoticed.
I mean I wasn't going around accusing everyone of being a bot or thinking that I was right all the time. I did have a few false positives and owned up to it. But once you see the pattern of behavior (big gap on joined date vs first active date, only posting in karma farming subs or subs known to have high bot populations) and accounts literally keeping the "as a large language model..." Or "Okay, here's a supportive Reddit-style comment with some minor spelling mistakes..." in some of their comments, ads at the end of their comments, and posting all hours of the day without any gaps for sleep or work, or posting fragments comments identical to ones posted months or years earlier by someone else, you start to realize maybe these accounts might not be genuine.
I have screenshots to prove it but if you really believe I don't know what I'm talking about then there's really nothing I can say to dissuade that.
I don't think anyone is questioning your ability to follow a hunch and get evidence to prove it.
The point is about how often you're correct on your first guess.