DoorDash responds to AI hoax

Catch up quick: The not-deleted post, which claimed fraudulent business practices by an unnamed major food delivery app, received over 87,000 upvotes and generated roughly 5,000 comments on Reddit as well as more than 36 million views on X.

• DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said on X, "This is not DoorDash, and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated the kind of culture described in this Reddit post."
• The company's official X account also replied, explaining that the Reddit post was not about DoorDash and sharing a blog post explaining "How DoorDash is Different."
• Uber executive Andrew Macdonald posted, "I am responsible for UberEats. This post is definitively not about us. I suspect it is completely made up. Don't trust everything you read on the internet."

What they're saying: While DoorDash was not named as the delivery app in question, its CEO was the first to respond to the fake post — and the company stands by this decision, says chief corporate affairs officer Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean.

• "What was represented is antithetical to how DoorDash operates.… If the conversation is about the industry or a platform like ours, we want to make sure that anybody who is engaging in that conversation and reading that information knows that it's not [about] us," she says.

The intrigue: The Reddit thread caught the attention of journalist and Platformer founder Casey Newton, who reached out to the whistleblower to learn more and verify the post.

• The whistleblower provided Newton with a fake, AI-generated image of an Uber Eats employee badge and fake internal documents.
• Newton was able to identify this as a hoax, but as he writes, "For most of my career up until this point, the document shared with me by the whistleblower would have seemed highly credible in large part because it would have taken so long to put together.… Today, though, the report can be generated within minutes, and the badge within seconds."

Between the lines: After learning that the post was AI-generated, Jarvis-Shean said that DoorDash still would've responded in the same way.

• "It doesn't matter if the fire was started by an accident or by an arsonist, if your house is burning, don't stand around arguing about the cause instead of grabbing a fire hose to douse the flames," she says.
• "You have to be able to respond quickly and tell your story to the millions of people who are reading the disinformation."

Zoom in: You also have to optimize that story for AI chatbots.

• To do that, DoorDash created a blog post to serve as the central source of truth for customers and journalists, and also for large language models.

The bottom line: These fake leaks, made more believable with AI, create huge reputational risks for companies and brands, especially as newsrooms shrink and voices on social media portray themselves as trusted sources of information.

More on Axios:

• Instacart ends controversial pricing strategy, bashes "misinformation"