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Comment by achrono | Hacker News Reader

In typical SV style, this is just to throw it out there and let second order effects build up. At some point I expect OpenAI to simply form a partnership with LinkedIn and Amazon.

In fact, I suspect LinkedIn might even create a new tier that you'd have to use if you want to use LinkedIn via OpenAI.

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I do data work in domains that are closely related to LinkedIn (sales and recruitment), and let me tell you, the chances that LinkedIn lets any data get out of the platform are very slim.

They have some of the strongest anti-bot measures in the world and they even prosecute companies that develop browser extensions for manual extraction. They would prevent people from writing LinkedIn info with pen and paper, if they could. Their APIs are super-rudimentary and they haven't innovated in ages. Their CRM integrations for their paid products (ex: Sales Nav) barely allow you to save info into the CRM and instead opt for iframe style widgets inside your CRM so that data remains within their moat.

Unless you show me how their incentives radically change (ex: they can make tons of money while not sacrificing any other strategic advantage), I will continue to place a strong bet on them being super defensive about data exfiltration.

Why would platforms like LinkedIn want this? Bots have never been good for social media…

If they are getting a cut of that premium subscription income, they'd want it if it nets them enough.

Would that income be more than the lost ad revenue (as applicants stop visiting their site) plus lost subscriptions on the employer side (as AI-authored applications make the site useless to them)? Who knows but probably MS are betting on no.

LinkedIn is probably the only social platform that would be improved by bots.

Hiring companies certainly don’t want bots to write job applications. They are already busy weeding out the AI-written applications and bots would only accelerate their problem. Hiring companies happen to be paying customers of LinkedIn.

Job applications aren't the only use case for using LinkedIn in this connected way, but even on that topic -- I think we are moving pretty quickly to no longer need to "weed out" AI-written applications.

As adoption increases, there's going to be a whole spectrum of AI-enabled work that you see out there. So something that doesn't appear to be AI written is not necessarily pure & free of AI. Not to mention the models themselves getting better at not sounding AI-style canned. If you want to have a filter for lazy applications that are written with a 10-word prompt using 4o, sure, that is actually pretty trivial to do with OpenAI's own models, but is there another reason you think companies "don't want bots to write job applications"?

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