LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool
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It would be content so unhinged, it would remove the need for management consulting as an industry - companies could simply type their problems in chat and do the exact opposite of what Evil LinkedIn Neuro suggests!
(for the uninitiated: https://www.youtube.com/@Neurosama & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-sama)
No matter what you ask it, it'll brag about what a great job it's doing answering you, announce that it's having a baby, then tell everybody that it's being let go because there are better AI. It'll thank a few key people who it worked with, and tell you that it's actually thrilled with this opportunity to take a break from answering your question, and will spend more time on its old hobby of being an online resume.
The converse will be true, but the price of AI will just make poor people have to suffer even more
Just the long march of wealth inequality and it's time sucking capitalism.
A recent issue in the job application realm is AI application bots that will apply to 100's of jobs on your behalf, which is the opposite problem. Seems like both sides are racing to make applications as useless as possible as quickly as possible.
If you don't have a network, good luck in the future.
For me the bar for "reputationally safe" is really high because my market (cynical tech CTO's etc. don't respond well to things that sounds like ChatGPT) and so I don't expect to any time soon, but for many others that bar is pretty low as long as it's good enough for LinkedIn's algorithm to give it impressions.
A Nash Equilibrium of automated bullshit, it'll just make everything more miserable, programmatically.
If you need to pay the bills and this helps, good for you.
But boy howdy does this sound terrible. It's amazing to me that there are people out there who take anything on LinkedIn seriously. I mean, it's not like the posts are inherently bad, but the entire point of the site is to "influence" and sell to each other. It's horrible. If I were looking for talent, it'd probably be the last site I'd use.
Because while I have kind of the same opinion as you, I also know lots of (good and generally smart) people who say they learn a ton of useful work-related stuff from reading LinkedIn posts.
Not everyone is at the same point in their career, or has the same level of knowledge and confidence in their craft or job position. For some folks, reading thoughts and writings from more senior people can actually be beneficial..
And yes there's a lot of platitudes and BS on LinkedIn, but some people do put real effort into sharing actually useful information as well.
I suspect this says more about what the reader doesn't know and their mastery of info self-exposure than it says about the contentfulness of LinkedIn posts*.
* Not counting content originating elsewhere re-posted on or linked to from LinkedIn.
Look I get it, there's a lot of crap on LinkedIn for sure, and it's pretty obvious this crowd is generally against "influencers".. I also see no value in them generally speaking.
But it's reductive, and inaccurate, to say that there's zero value across the board on there and that every post is low-value influencer-spam. Not everyone is trying to build an audience or push their newsletter.
Some people just want to share their knowledge and interact with their professional peers, and for better or worse LinkedIn is the most known place to do that..
You could say the same thing about this place. Why are we all here?
Not to preen or self-promote or "network". Most here are anonymous.
Both of us use names, and you have the meethn and I have a "we are hiring" ... Still, I don't think either of us is here just to meet people or just to hire. My profile has only said that for a couple of the more than a decade I've been here.
Anyways, I feel like we've gotten off-track.. Sounds like we both agree that all the brand-builders and influencers on LinkedIn provide dubious value.
But I still think there is other value on LinkedIn from people who just want to connect and discuss work topics with peers or other professionals in their circle.
I've personally had some good discussions, much like I've had on here, in comment threads on LinkedIn.. Definitely not as much as HN, but if you're smart about the content you engage with (like any other social network) then it can still be useful and rewarding.
I have seen a number of CVs over the past few months that fall into two eye-rolling categories. First, those that have the same set of skills in the exact same order, and routinely sport identical expressions. Over time I've come to associate them with low-grade content farms. Second, a smaller set of exceptionally polished ones that feel unique and really want me to interview the candidate. These candidates will then utterly bomb in the interview, to the point where I'm often asking myself whose CV it was they had submitted.
Signal-to-noise ratio is tending towards zero.
This is why "I've submitted 1000 resumes in 3 weeks and can't get an interview!" posts on social media are rampant.
it will be the first AI CEO.
On linkedin your next resume will have the impact of mount rushmore, sitting lincoln or a soviet era workers monument. (The thinker will be censored out because of nudity) :)
So, what were you trying to say?
I learned this while considering watching a video from MIT. Accordingly, I’m adding “AI Training Coordinator — MIT Inspired” to my skills.
God, I hope the poor thing never achieves consciousness. It will be like the butter-passing robot from Rick & Morty.
During this brilliant interaction I managed to learn a lot about improving my leadership capabilities, and teamwork.
If you are also looking to humbly increase your leadership potential, seek out #CoastalCoder #Mindfulness #Leadership or contact us for your #marketing needs
But read on for what it taught me about B2B marketing.
If it was just a bunch of linked profiles with a job matching function, it would still be LinkedIn.
But of course, you can't work at a place that does something that mundane without suggesting something that makes you look like Facebook or Twitter. You have to at least give people some sort of reason to see what their old colleagues are up to.
Nobody really wants to read the LinkedIn feed, so it's perfectly acceptable that it gets flooded with AI generated content. In effect, the content on LinkedIn is that picture of a happy family on your insurance brochure. You can't not have a photo of something on that kind of marketing document, and you can't be a social network without some sort of doom-scrollable content.
This is just a cheap way to generate some wallpaper.
I mean, not nobody. I follow a lot of people that post very thoughtful things that spark discussion, and it's one of the only places I know of other than here where I can discuss topics related to my career or field with peers, and for me that's useful.
Not just about viewership - if you are applying to positions, LinkedIn gives preference to candidates who are more engaged ON the network (posts, likes, comments, Pulse) over lurkers. [1]
So this is only getting worse. You'll have to see a lower quality feed just because the algorithm is forcing everyone to boost their own metrics anyway.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi - See your own tracking, look at the metrics description
Zooming out, I bet a lot of the economy is like this. In LI’s case literally some of the smartest people, people with PhDs who were maybe even born in another country, thinking for 40 hours a week about how to rank one piece of meaningless drivel above another one. This is instead of solving real, tangible problems that everyone can see. Ok maybe those people will pay taxes and end up contributing to something like education because they have to, but it’s a pretty inefficient way of making the world better.
I’ve recently remedied this to a degree by lowering salary expectations and looking in fields with a more scientific and practical basis in the products and outputs. Unfortunately I’m not a scientist, only a programmer, so my utility is seriously limited and finding work is quite a bit harder than if I were to stick within the SV startup scene.
We keep saying we need UBI but at the same time "we don't have enough homes". Then instead of UBI, maybe people should "make homes"? (That's just one example - there are also jobs in food, healthcare, mental illness care, spacecraft, etc...
In the end we have witnessed that we need stable inflation. If we have fast inflation, then unlimited numbers of people are left behind, for no fault of their own. If inflation is relatively stable, people can adjust slowly, carefully, and both companies and employees benefit from that.
A 2021 study empirically tested several of Graeber's claims, such as that bullshit jobs were increasing over time and that they accounted for much of the workforce. Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful.
These people are self-reporting this. Quite frankly with the number of people in bullshit jobs who think they're doing work I wouldn't really put a lot of value in those types of self-reports.
I wouldn't tell my boss or my colleagues the job I do is useless for hopefully obvious reasons, but when I really think about it in the grand scheme of things it really is a Bullshit Job. Basically any SaaS is (with some exceptions of course) just a collection of Bullshit Jobs.
But there's also nothing really wrong with that. We live in the society we live in, which basically necessitates the existence of many Bullshit Jobs in order for things to keep working as they do. I'd even argue basically anything that isn't to do with Healthcare, Education or similar things along those lines count as bullshit jobs really.
It's "probably junk" because some random EU survey in 2021 said so?
>often only because of regulatory requirements
Textbook "bullshit job" (that doesn't exist, of course).
Often you'll have a chain of movers A - Z. Each link can almost be it's own company depending on the industry. Naturally each thinks they're important, because someone has to move it around. Of course, you could go from A straight to Z and eliminate 25 companies.
Point is many, maybe most, companies don't actually produce direct value. They facilitate and they move. Now that's much harder to analyze.
I suspect there are a lot of these sorts of investments in the big players, a bunch of teams doing far-from-core things that someone thought was worthwhile.
Even now LinkedIn is possibly the worst platform for being polluted with "AI slop", I cannot understand why they are looking to advance this further. Hell, when you go to write a post now there is a big flashing button saying "USE AI TO WRITE THIS POST"...?!?!
“Networking as a concept was highly intimidating to me, until I reframed it in my mind as ‘making friends’ instead of the traditional meaning which made me feel like I was using people as stepping stones.”
https://www.nysscpa.org/article-content/gen-z--now-networks-...
Little point. It'll be like facebook's opt-out and only cover things you post/update going forward. Everything you've already posted has already been slurped into the training set and won't be taken out and the model(s) retrained.
The only way to show disapproval in this sort of behaviour that they'll feel is to stop using services that use auto-opt-in for anything, and not enough people are likely to do that for it to be effective.
The opt-out option doesn't exist in my setting. So it seems like they are targeting areas outside of the EU for this slurping, at least on the surface.
Since I can never prove whether my data was included in the AI or not... they could slurp it regardless and claim ignorance until some internal whistleblower brings it to light.
But that isn't enforced with the teeth it really needs, and I really don't trust that companies like LinkedIn will do the right thing, nor the legally required thing where they differ, given how much effort it could be and the likelihood of anything being done about it if they don't and this isn't obviously detected (or a whistleblower speaks out). So my choice is to walkaway from the service (or never use it in the first place) or just accept that my stuff will get used that way.
That, and given it is public information that we've already agreed to let LinkedIn use however the hell it likes via signup and “by continuing to use this service”¹, so there would be the whole “is it even a privacy issue?” argument² to have before getting to that nitty-gritty.
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[1] again, maybe there are legal routes to stop that, though I don't know about you but I certainly can't afford the time or legal resources to investigate further
[2] I'm assuming “right to be forgotten” doesn't apply in this case, as we are talking about a particular use of the information not wanting the complete removal of it from all their services.
It’s a low enough bar that I think AI content will fit right in.
The setting is visible and settable for me (it was ON, now it's OFF)
That or LinkedIn should at least be compelled to ask explicit permission for model training. None of this Darth Vader stuff where they "altered the deal".
Also, if you already “agreed” to TOS that lets them do whatever they want, they don't need to change it.
And also that the concept of rights hasn't quite arrived in the digital sphere yet.
Humanity better keep an eye on the owners and managers responsible for these decisions, and hold them to account for their selfishness, deceptiveness, theft, coercion and greed
I’m curious if LI has scraped data before giving people the opportunity to disable the feature.
> When this setting is on LinkedIn and its affiliates may use your personal data and content you create on LinkedIn for that purpose.
I'm guessing that "personal data" means they're making models that (are one way) AI-based systems will have access to the huge database of personal information entrusted to LinkedIn.
And even contemporary LLMs make this much more accessible, for more casual use, by more people.
Presumably this sharing of data for training is already happening, and (of course) the new "preference" defaulted to ON, even for people who'd previously opted-out of related privacy settings (e.g., "Profile visibility outside LinkedIn" was OFF).
A ton of LinkedIn users are private individuals (not public figures). They're only on LinkedIn because they want continued employment, that's where the recruiters are, and many employers and other opportunities (including YC?) require LinkedIn profiles.
Given LinkedIn's dominant role, with many citizens required to use LinkedIn for something as basic as employment, and meaning people have to share personal information with LinkedIn, maybe it's time for US regulators to set rules on how that information may be used and shared by LinkedIn.
Despite the UK still having the data protection act.
I don't mean fake users (although I wouldn't put corporate greed beyond trying to fake users). It could be sold as a helpful feature, like summaries of workplace happenings, news, world events, or discussions on the platform in the feeds. Of course, they would need to be filtered for ethical alignment with the social media company, as well as community safety, naturally... Certain political opinions may be less safe than others, and so on...
It is already happening with engagement farming users, so a platform doing it to make itself look more active is not a stretch at all. Reddit did that sort of astroturfing the old fashioned way back when it was starting up, so there is at least one well documented precedent already.
This disregard for your customers is very typical now. Not even a "how do you do" or a popup informing me of this change to my "preferences".
I had no idea; I didn't think I was reading many and I wasn't doing it systematically, just being curious.
After getting Premium, I could see who viewed my profile and how many views over time, which I felt was useful. It tells me about personalised top jobs, and it sometimes comes up with things I wouldn't have searched for that do seem interesting. Nothing ever came of those as jobs, but I've learned about companies doing interesting things which overlap my skillset as a result.
There's also the ability to send more messages a month to people I'm not connected with, but I write so rarely that's never been an issue.
I'm still on Premium by choice, but I still get the fake message ads, spammer connection requests and promoted ad posts.
In the end, my last 3 jobs were obtained via LinkedIn, the current one was via a LinkedIn social post which caused me to write to the poster, and a field I work in now (zero-knowledge proofs) is because of a conference someone talked about on LinkedIn. Many plausibly good contracts are advertised only as LI social posts, not even as LI jobs. So it's undoubtedly valuable to me for work, and valuable to have parasocial connections on it (to see those posts), even if it is a strange mixture of fake platitudes and real but self-interested posts.
It also only applies going forward, so the default opt-in means they've already taken what they want before we get a chance to say no. Though to be fair I never expected otherwise.
Tell stories how “a man walked and saved universe” and end every sentence with “agree?”?
LinkedIn AI: I am proud and humbled to be promoted to the level of senior qsort code writer, and wish to thank my amazing colleagues at LinkedIn HQ for their tremendous support over the last 18 months. It is with great regret that I have moved on from writing bubble sorts. Please click this link to apply to see an industry analysis of quick sort code.
> 136. LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool (twitter.com/racheltobac) 387 points by lopkeny12ko 17 hours ago | unvote | flag | hide | 221 comments
> LinkedIn seems to have auto enrolled folks in the US, but hearing from folks in the EU that they are not seeing this listed in their settings (likely due to privacy regulations).
Honestly, GDPR looks like a godsend! It came just at the right time!
An actual article: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/18/linkedin-scraped-user-data...
AI: "Thats great, here are 10 B2B SaaS sales tricks to learn from a family death, first.."
I'd love to see the slew of AI-generated garbage, since it'll be completely indistinguishable from regular LI "content"!
> Note that we do not currently train content-generating AI models from members located in the EU, EEA, or Switzerland.
Anyway, the best move is still to just get out of this platform [2]. LinkedIn has a history full of dark patterns and really bad behaviors concerning personal data. At some point they even impersonated their users by mailing their contacts (sometimes shadily scrapped) in their name without the impersonated user consent or knowledge.
from the commercial/influencer side, many have taken the AI route already by using LLMs to help write or spice up their posts. even for paid users, the site allows to help you write your bio or certain types of pieces for the past few quarters.
maybe the posts of the yesteryear and like the comments section seems like a "valuable" source for them really. although it would be a bit more scary if this is for video and photos too, although besides the headshots it has also been a lot of AI content in the tech space lately.
When everyone agreed to LinkedIn’s terms, no one agreed at the time to have their personal data used to train AI.
I say that as a happy product, uhh, user of every social network out there.
If you're paying, you're also the product.
Take payroll companies. Their customers pay a lot for the service and in all but one case I’m aware of, the customers’ data is being sold.
Because with a dataset like this...
...all the content will be below the imaginary "read more" fold!
/s