I read my first TIFU story today. I guess the algorithm just randomly decided to serve one, despite the fact I don’t even follow the sub. I was mildly interested at first, and quickly became engrossed.
Then I read another one. My interest was truly piqued.
And then one more.
I soon realised, they almost exclusively followed the EXACT same pattern. The length, the buildup, the tone, the voice. The grammar and punctuation are almost identical. They even all capitalise one or two words in the third or fourth paragraph… To top it all off, even the variation in sentence length shares a recognisable pattern. I was shocked!
Now here comes the telling part: once you check OP’s account, their profile is usually less than 30 days old and there are no other posts — at least nothing significant (or it has all been deleted).
And now, I can’t read any more TIFU stories, because they all seem generic, and I can’t trust that they’re real. For illustration purposes, this post is an attempt to write in the same style.
TL;DR: TIFU by realising most stories on this sub are generic AI slop, and now I have completely lost interest in this sub and can’t stop questioning all content on Reddit.
Comments
I didn’t notice as many details as you, but I definitely noticed weirdness with the ridiculousness of the posts. Like, they weren’t passing the basic smell test. But I chalked it up to some bored person who wanted internet points. Same thing with “Am I overreacting?”
The irony …
Questioning things is good and important. Glad you’re being more critical about the media you’re consuming
Can someone explain to me why who benefits from posting AI stories? Why does it happen?
The internet is fucked my G, nothing is real anymore. We need to go back outside like the good old days.
I just Googled “reddit TIFU post patterns” and learned that some users claim AI-generated stories often follow a structure similar to the Hero’s Journey, which includes an inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution… pretty wild if true!
Usually, there are two types of people: one isn’t good at storytelling, so they throw their TIFU drafts into ChatGPT, the other just wants to make up stories using ChatGPT. Well, either way, that can really cause trust issues.
“For illustration purposes, this post is an attempt to write in the same style”. Phew! I was gonna say…
I’ve thought this about other subreddits too, but there should be a minimum age and/or minimum comment karma from that Account in order to post.
Same here. Obvious many posts are duplicates n/or AI
What a humorous observation, fellow human.
Interesting observation — and you’re definitely not alone in noticing that pattern. TIFU has become a bit formulaic, likely because a certain storytelling structure gets the most engagement. Whether it’s karma farming or just people mimicking what “works,” it does make it harder to tell what’s genuine. That said, every once in a while, a truly original post sneaks through — those are the gems worth sticking around for.
You know they’re real when they use “cause” instead of “because”.
Welcome to the dead internet just bots talking to bots.
They’re almost always posted by a similar account style too. The username is (Adjective)_(Noun)NumberNumberNumber and their cake day is like 3 or 4 months prior to the post.
AITA has been the same for a long time.
Liz is slacking
They predate AI. It’s amateur writers who enjoy drama and enjoy getting off others falling for rage bait.
AITA and TIFU are both the favorite forums for a handful of these writers.
Anitwork and workreform have them as well.
Karma farming is both systemic and endemic on reddit.
Which is crazy to me, but, well, here we are.
Almost all stories are made up on Reddit. It doesn’t matter which sub you’re in.
> go on r/AmItheAsshole
> “AITA for (doing bad thing) to (trans or autistic sister or friend)” followed by the most over the top insane story that would never happen in real life
> twelve posts of this each with 8k upvotes
The — is what gives it away, every time.
And 90% of these replies are AI generated.
Welcome to the dead internet.
I just sort by top and read old posts that predate AI being good at writing. Some of them are probably human written fiction instead, but hey you can get a laugh out of it here and there and then move on
I kind of see your point but….I can’t really feel annoyed by it? I work with some people whose first language is not English and, usually, when trying to send emails for whatever reason, they would slap it on Copilot/Gemini to help them organize their thoughts or make them easier to understand.
I think a lot of that may be happening here, where someone just puts their story on an AI first to give it better organization and then post it.
OP, I can give you a real non AI TIFU story if you want.
But it won’t be from today, it’s from Saturday;s barbecue with my friend and his wife.
Eye opening! Now I’m side-eyeing every TIFU post too.
I think I’ve been coming to the same realisation with posts in r/pettyrevenge & r/maliciouscompliance
There’s been a slew of posts to those subreddits lately with stories that just feel… off. They sound like they could be real, but they’re all one or two paragraphs long at most, with perfect grammar, spelling and punctuation. And none of them have felt that satisfying to read.
Maybe it’s just me preferring more details & a bigger payoff, and generally being paranoid/ sickened by how AI is goddamn everywhere these days. But yeah. Definitely been on my mind. 😶
P.s. Beautiful touch using all the same patterns you listed. Halfway through I was sure the twist was going to be that this was an AI post all along. 😂 (even had to check to make sure your account wasn’t 30 days old, lol)
AITA and AIO are about 75% AI slop, too. Same structure, same patterns, always “throwaway account because people I mention are on reddit”, even though the scenario is so specific it would be obvious to any mentioned parties. And always “friends and family are blowing up my phone saying I’m wrong”
The Apollo app had a feature that showed you how old each account was, right next to account name. I think there was even a feature to filter out comments by new accounts.
That em dash in your post makes me think this is AI content as well.
This is wild — I. Am. Shocked.
Wait a second…OP capitalised a word in the fourth paragraph! J’accuse!
Even if its real people, they learn the patterns from reading and repeat them back. No real way to tell anymore.
It’s honestly fucking miserable to go on some of these posts and see kind, real humans giving advice and support to a computer. The only good thing about it is it’s seriously broken my time I spend using any social media because it makes scrolling so unenjoyable and irritating.
Everyone here is a bot except for you.
> They even all capitalise one or two words in the third or fourth paragraph…
damn you weren’t kidding… kind of hilarious that there’s such an obvious tell
Hahah well played, I see what you did there!
Yeah. I used to consider this a creative writing sub that I read for the lulz. Now it just an AI prompting sub. That i read for the lulz.
Yeah I’ve been noticing that more and more i look at the sub. :/ starting to think of blocking the sub after getting like 15 AI stories in a row.
Unfortunately not all of them
Subreddit theme song
Know what, you’re right. I’m unfollowing this sub.
The whole Internet is just bots. All of us are AI bots anyways. Wait, you say you are not? maybe it’s just me then…
one principle of machine learning is that you must not feed in AI output into its training dataset, or it will amplify the biases it has until it’s unusable. if those posts are AI slop, it’ll slowly poison models trained on reddit’s corpus (honestly i think this is happening all over the internet anyway)
They’re most likely from bot farms made by mods, reddit has some kind of influencer type payout for garnering interaction in subreddits.
Best way to enjoy this sub is to check in every few weeks and sort by top posts of the month.
I figured a lot of reddit stories are made up honestly
so many of them start with “I recently came into some money — nothing life changing, but I paid off some bills and decided to treat myself to something nice”
that’s a dead giveaway to me
> can’t stop questioning all content on Reddit.
And so you should. AI is getting so good these days (check /r/singularity) that it’s getting harder to even spot videos if you’re just doomscrolling. So comments and users? Forget about it, you’ll never know.
For the story to then be read by AI and put on top of Subway surfer, or “reacted” to by some random “content creator”
And the AI circle of slop continues
Remove the AI from the Reddit of today and you’ll have about 40 posts left. Filter out the bots and it’ll be about 10.
But then there can be heaps of responses for some posts (over 1,000) and way further down people start getting suspicious.
now, do that with everything on the internet. if anything starts to succeed in changing your mind about something that matters, and isn’t properly sourced – go source it yourself before you start buying in.
edit: and don’t forget to source the source. and then the sources sources source. curation of information is the future of the internet.
Exactly what an AI bot would post.
>Now here comes the telling part: once you check OP’s account, their profile is usually less than 30 days old and there are no other posts — at least nothing significant (or it has all been deleted).
Isn’t that pretty understandable on TIFU? I don’t even frequent this sub or read stuff, but if you’re gonna post some embarrassing/cringy story surely you’d make a throwaway account specifically for that?
Yes, but this was pretty obvious to anyone who followed the whole AI thing for a while now, when OpenAI released ChatGPT this was the natural consequence. The internet is doomed and will turn into an AI graveyard in the next decade. This is not just a thing on this sub, a lot of the big subs are absolutely flooded by AI posts and comments and it’s happening on every social media platform.
Same with r/TrueOffMyChest. The funniest are when it’s a sexual assault one which OP was not aware of at the time, 100’s of people come out saying “that’s rape!”, it’s pointless reading the comments because that’s all there is.
-suspicion intensifies-
What is the ducking point of posting AI stories? Couldn’t you actually make money using AI to generate sludge content on Facebook or YouTube instead of posting a dumb story on Reddit?
The same terrible juvenile typos that make it sound like a child wrote it even though they are supposedly married with three kids and a mortgage…
even before AI, they were mostly creative writing exercises
yeah, same with AITA, used to be my favorite thing to binge read.
it’s really ruining reddit, i don’t understand what these people get out of it
TIFU and AITA have long been mostly creative writing exercises.
You even got the em-dash!
Most TIFU’s are: “hey everybody!…I have SEX!!”
Or: “I shit myself!…here’s 60 different synonyms/ways to say poop”
Bro just discovered the dead interenet is already here
Well I did a TIFU post and it ended up with me having to yell-type about studies on urine 600 times. Obviously having AI write something about my sister secretly being a goat would be easier.
Edit: the really bad AI-ism I can’t unsee is having posts be joke-y but never actually funny, with people constantly smirking, going pale & feeling numb.