AITBF for using AI to fake a relationship drama post just to farm karma?
AITBF for making a fake AI story to get more karma and people actually believed it?
I (27M) know the title sounds bad, but hear me out. I’ve been scrolling through subreddits like r/AmItheButtface and r/AmItheAsshole for months, and honestly, a lot of the drama feels so formulaic that it’s almost mechanical. A few nights ago, I was bored at 2 AM, looking at my stagnant karma count, and decided to run a little experiment.
I opened up an AI chatbot and gave it a prompt to generate the most chaotic, tragic, but weirdly believable relationship drama possible. I told it to include classic Reddit tropes: shared phone locations, an overly suspicious partner, gaslighting, and a cliffhanger ending. The AI spat out this incredibly dramatic story about a guy who suspected his boyfriend of cheating because his location kept glitching at a specific "mystery address" every Tuesday night.
The story was pretty well-written, so I made a throwaway account, threw on a "Romantic" flair, and posted it.
I honestly thought it would get buried or immediately called out as fake. Instead, it absolutely blew up. Within ten hours, it had hundreds of upvotes and the comment section was an absolute warzone. People were writing literal essays analyzing the "boyfriend's" behavior, telling me to pack my bags, calling the boyfriend a master manipulator, and sharing their own deeply personal betrayal stories in solidarity.
I felt a massive rush seeing the notification counter climb, but then the guilt started to creep in. People were investing real emotional energy, empathy, and time into a situation that was completely fabricated by a language model while I sat back collecting internet points.
I ended up deleting the post because I felt like a fraud, but now I’m wondering if I’m actually a massive buttface for manipulating people like that, or if it’s just harmless creative writing on an internet forum where half the stuff is probably fake anyway.
So, Reddit, AITBF?