I just logged into my LinkedIn account this morning – and as I paged down through the “news feed”, almost every post that appeared was obviously written with AI – using the same formulaic “insightful” observation language, phrases and organization.
I am not opposed to using AI – but at least disclose it when using AI (which I try to do in each of my blog posts that use AI).
In the case of LinkedIn, however, the shared insights were generated by a machine – not the individual who has shared the unattributed text. This does not make the poster look insightful – it appears more like embarrassing content mill stuff.
I have a post scheduled to come out in late September about LinkedIn (yeah, I create my content here months in advance, then schedule the posts to auto-publish – that way I do not have to create content every day).
Most social platforms reward click-bait, emotion laden, political outrage type posts, and videos and photos of either outrage or attractive young people.
LinnkedIn is different – their Algorithm takes into account your perceived expertise, authority and interests – such that people with more education (in my feed, that means people with Ph.D., M.D., JD degrees or executive titles) are more likely to have their posts shared with others – especially if their post content aligns with LinkedIn’s assessment of the poster’s expertise.
Lots of people are now using LLMs to auto generate posts on LinkedIn, within their subject area specialty. More content means more chances for the post to be viewed by others – which leads to more engagement, which encourages the algorithm to share it even more.
Unfortunately, by the end of the day, most everything we’ve seen on LinkedIn is sort of fake. Even the headshots are fake too! Have you seen the ads for AI generated photos? Having an enhanced fake photo is said to increase your views! Some of the example ad photos are kind of funny – one showed a brown eyed, blonde haired woman with shoulder length hair – the AI enhancement (I guess they didn’t notice) had changed her eyes to blue, and lengthened her hair by at least 4 inches. When everything is fake, how can you believe anything?
No AI was used in the creating the above post. Just me and my keyboard.
