Casey Newton

Yeah.

So he sent that over and said, I hope this suffices.

His photo and name had been blacked out.

But I thought, well, this is at least a starting point.

I asked then if there was any document that he might have that would speak to his actual allegations.

And while he complained that that might put him at additional risk, he said he would think about it.

And about a day later, he messaged me again on Signal and said, I have something for you.

And it was an 18-page document that is probably the craziest thing a source has ever shared with me.

Well, one was that as I read through it, it seemed to verify not just a handful of allegations, but essentially every single thing in the post.

It was presented as a kind of research paper that had been done by a behavioral economics group inside the company, which he was saying that this was coming from Uber.

And it said that, oh, yeah, you know, here's how we are calculating the desperation score.

And here's what we're doing to, you know, slow down the deliveries for the customers that aren't paying.

And, you know, in hindsight, it probably should have been a red flag that I was reading a description of almost cartoon villainy.

Yeah, well, again, there was that moment of this is all seeming to be too good to be true.

And I thought, well, let me see if I have any tools at my disposal that I can use.

And so I know that a lot of the AI image generators embed these digital watermarks in the image that are designed to be useful in exactly cases like this.

So I took the photo that he had sent me of his badge and I put it into ChatGPT and I said, does this raise any red flags for you?

The answer I got was no.

And then put it into Google Gemini, which came back and said,

this image was generated in whole or part with Gemini.