AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn | Hacker News Reader

AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn

pangram.com

247 pointsmukmuk218 comments

I wrote a post on linkedin last year titled "Do not use AI to write."

Boy, was it controversial. I could not believe how hard some people were pushing back in the comments.

Quoting from myself there:

"When you write your own words, you are forging your own voice. It is distinctive, conveys your unique world view, and connects with others in a way that is specific to you alone.

If you use an AI tool to write for you instead, you lose all of that."

That seems blindingly self-evident to me, but apparently a lot of folks disagree.

Something else I said:

"Writing is hard because thinking is hard. When you write, you forge your thoughts, distinctions, mental models and even feelings into the clarity of precision that the written word demands. When you outsource your writing to an AI tool, you lose more than you know."

I guess a lot of people don't want to bother with all that.

I hate to break it to you, but most people don't have a compelling voice, and they don't have a cohesive world view, and they typically fail at connecting with others, especially if they're schlepping around on LinkedIn trying to social-media-post their way to a job or networking opportunities.

Also there are so many folks, especially on LI, who don't even have fluent English, or decent grammar, and therefore behind the filter of an erudite LLM is an excellent place to stay, pull some levers, and plop out some really compelling word-salad.

That is just the way of the world today. Whether people are doing minimal processing, through SpellCheck or Grammarly, or just prompting an LLM to generate walls of text, they're using assistance to actually find their voice, or filter their own weak voice through something that will win friends and influence more people than they ever could on their own.

I agree completely; it's been observed "LinkedIn people" are somewhat psychotic.

Look, if the robot can write so goodly that I get more updoots, then how is that bad? I can trade in updoots for money, cars, and condominiums. It's about updoots, and I know your ideas are bad because I'm downdooting them.

You're absolutely right. I think a lot of it just comes down to the fact that people who've never put any real effort into something (design, writing, programming, etc.) never really understand the beauty and uniqueness that comes with original human content, and so they don't see their slop the same way someone with experience in that area would.

> Boy, was it controversial. I could not believe how hard some people were pushing back in the comments.

I've spent very little time on LinkedIn, but what I have read struck like individuals writing in the voice of a corporate communications department giving a TED talk.

So, given the kind of metrics many corporations are putting in front of employees, I bet there are a lot of people on LinkedIn who strongly believe writing with AI is the company-approved RIGHT THING TO DO(tm).

Even before AI, LinkedIn was already a cesspool of people posting trite crap frequently just to advertise that they have “followers” and collect new ones. Worse than the recruiters.

In what bizarro world would I want to follow a rando, who has absolutely nothing to do with my career, on a platform purportedly designed for like minded people to advance their career/business?

Might as well consider the dog with the most fleas as the “Alpha”!

It isn't surprising given how many people totally blew off assignments in english class growing up. Even pre ai, pre social media, reading was dying or already dead. Writing a close second. So many people in high powered positions sending those

"ok

Sent from my iPhone."

emails.

Many people in fact don't like doing. They like shutting off their brain. Sitting still and not using their body and letting muscles atrophy and fat pile up. AI is perfectly aligned with this disease inherent in our post survival civilization. These are the people who would have died off in the hunter gatherer era. Now we go against the forces of natural selection and what do you know, lazy nonthinking people everywhere.

That was the low-key surprise for me in the Epstein files: so many rich, powerful people wrote at an early grade-school level even in professional contexts. I know that’s not a universal sample but it made me wonder how many unsung admin assistants, grad students, etc. cleaned up everything they wrote for a broader context.

Informal devience is a social signifier "I want you to know I don't have to do that shit"

"... And you can't stop me, 'cuz I'm better than you."

Yeah, it makes sense as a display of clout, the normal rules not binding them. I would have thought there was more sense of pride but that’s very middle class of me, I suppose.

I worked for some very wealthy and powerful.

Some were low IQ but had power and money. Some were busy. Some did not want to put any additional effort because the relationship permitted them to be informal, lazy, brief.

In person and with contracts they were extremely diligent with their words.

Yea, it's a glimpse into a totally different world!

When I get ready to send an E-mail to a SVP or other VIP at work, I agonize over the wording, get others' feedback on it, write a draft, get it reviewed, write another one, make sure all my facts are straight, make sure there's a TLDR up front, make sure it's formal enough but not stuffy, then clench my butt and hit send...

Then you look at the Epstein files, and these E-mails are going to CEOs and heads of state! And they're like:

    "yo, wasssup retards!! we doin some kiddy diddling FRIDAY. who in???????? peace out bitch4es"

You hit the nail on the head! Today’s fast paced world demands clear, concise communication. Fear not! Artificial Intelligence (AI) can allow people to communicate more effectively, allowing them to get a few extra minutes at the gym without guilt. Would you like some tips for improving work-life balance?

(Not AI, I couldn’t resist!)

This drives me crazy when dealing with various contractors in my area. They often only answer by text, and can take a little while to do so. Not a big deal.

But If I send a message with more than one question, there is what feels like a 10% change they will answer all my questions and a 90% chance they will either answer one or none and I’ll just get an “ok”. And I am talking about 5 lines messages not 50 lines.

So I have to send my questions one at a time, wait sometimes minutes to hours for an answer, then send the next one.

Of course I can also call, but often can’t reach them. Or can reach the front desk that doesn’t have the answers. I understand people are busy but it turns something that should be one message into a cat and mouse game

I learned that in a business context, it was extremely important to adhere to one issue per email.

If I peppered someone with a series of questions or worse, bundled unrelated issues into one message, they would all probably be mishandled. I think it was a mismatch of expectations and/or how corporate workers use email apps.

So if I held every message to one topic, one question, things tended to work as expected.

By email this is true but you can’t do that as well by chat or texts. You only get one thread per contact.

The contractors who are best at doing high quality work are often not the best at written communication. People who enjoy reading and writing don't tend to go into that line of work in the first place. And they're probably juggling your questions with a dozen other urgent issues from employees, suppliers, and other customers. The frustration is understandable but we have to be realistic in our expectations.

> So I have to send my questions one at a time,

That's what i learned in a big company.

My mind sort of shuts off once I recognize something is written by AI. It's really hard to try and force myself to keep reading. Even if a piece of writing walks the line of being written by a human or AI, my mind will want to disengage.

At this particular time in history, it seems that almost all work is performative, showing up at work is a performance, and work isn’t even really necessary. We live in a dumb world.

I would argue ~80%

And that is 99.9% of HR, accounting, and every social media related company.

Most people are not good at articulating their thoughts into words, let alone writing well.

Now, AI has given all these Linkedin psychopaths who did not have a voice because of their affliction a rare kind of superpower to endlessly spew their meaningless dribble.

I cringe every time I have to go on the cesspool that is Linkedin, but forced to since am job hunting.

I couldn't agree with you more

AI gives the experience of competency to people who are deeply aware they are not competent. This is a hard thing to pry from someone's hands once they are holding it.

This is the most accurate take on AI I’ve ever read. The illusion of competency that AI conveys is especially frustrating because it keeps people who overly rely on it from actually developing the skills and knowledge that they wished they had.

Alternate viewpoint: the ideas and insights in the content are more important than the voice. The voice absolutely is critical in getting your ideas across and making a point effectively, but there is value in having fresh ideas being broadcast into the world.

To the extent that LLMs help this where otherwise people would simply have not spoken up, I think it's OK. Of course, the slopisms are an instant turn-off and limit the reach of those ideas, but at least they're out there now.

Personally I've developed a knack of quickly skimming through the bland language to get a sense of whether there is anything interesting enough to re-read more closely. It's become so ingrained that I don't mind wading through all the noise from all the other lazy, content-free slop to get to that little bit of signal.

I am in a writers group and many are extremely pro AI and regularly use AI to write or plan or ideate (novels)

The irony is, if one can't ideate or write novels, then why are they writing novels at all?

Many aspiring writers (perhaps most?) love the idea of having written, not so much the work of actually writing.

What's the quality level of what they are producing this way? Are they ending up with good pieces of writing?

Most of the LinkedIn AI generated posts are accompanied by an AI generated picture or diagram intended to grab your attention as you scroll. Those images have a certain obvious "look" to them so when I see them I routinely block the poster. This takes a bit of effort but has cleaned up my feed a lot.

I think you are right. But for non-native people this is already true. I feel like I can express myself in English the same as I would do in my native language. Sometimes using AI helps me pick a better word or a better way to phrase it.

I would never use AI to write in my native language though

This is the right way to use it! You're not making it write for you. You are instead using it to help you write your own words. Massively different.

> Writing is hard because thinking is hard.

You know, why should i think for myself when someone else does it for me ? /s

When I decided to leave my last job (I say last as I have no idea how to find work anymore), one of the top reasons is because they were pushing AI so hard on everyone. From support, development, management, to marketing, etc.. They started encouraging us to prompt AI for responses to questions from customers, co-workers, anyone and everything. The made us take mandatory "classes" on it. I lost my sh**. Things like "Oh, you don't need to waste your time responding to emails (even Slack) from people. You can use ChatGPT. A simple one or two line sentence can get you a few paragraphs!" Like, you want me to waste someone's time with a response that is not mine? Full of wasteful boilerplate just to make them believe they are reading a response from a person? Ugh. No thanks. Yeah, my ethics principals are going to be the end of me. I am fighting this AI trend with every fiber of my being, and I am losing everything because of it.

My feeling is that it interferes a lot with "the social media algorithms" and hence with the "infinite wall of random stuff from people you don't know".

In the last few years I have been going back to RSS feeds, subscribing to blogs I like. What I lose there is that I don't get suggestions for blogs I don't already know.

I genuinely wonder if there could be an opportunity for webrings there. Like blogs could have an RSS feed of "blogs I follow" by the author, and I could choose to follow them or at least visit them and selectively subscribe.

The thing is that many times, there is one article I like in a blog but not necessarily the rest. So more than "blogs I follow", it could be "articles I liked". So that if I subscribe to the RSS feed of someone, I get exposed to articles they "bookmarked", and eventually it can help me discover blogs I want to subscribe to.

Or maybe it all exists already. Or used to exist, probably.

A del.icio.us idea

https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring https://github.com/lukehsiao/openring-rs

seen these around

You know, I'll be that guy and say the following: Since you stepped back in time, I went back even further. I just stopped consuming content on the web that isn't YouTube, this site, or Kagi News.

It's all crap in my estimation and I'm better off without it polluting my brain. Still need to kick HN & YouTube though, it's a WIP.

Maybe someday I'll regain the focus to read books in a single sitting again.

> I went back even further

Further than carefully selecting the articles I read? I don't understand... I occasionally watch a video on YouTube, but again it's carefully selected.

I feel like you're telling me that watching a video on YouTube is bad, but watching the exact same video on a DVD is "old school" and therefore better. I don't mind so much about the fact that I get it over the Internet, I care about quality. I subscribe to a handful of carefully-selected blogs through RSS as a way to easily see when they publish something new (which is rare, because it's quality).

LinkedIn is totally useless at this point.

- If you're a job seeker, most of the jobs are fake for pretend growth optics. - If you're a senior level or executive you're targeted non-stop by sales people telling you about "the conversations they're having ..." - If you're looking for actual thought leadership or interesting information, you're bombarded with random tik-tok style videos, totally contrived stories and "lessons" to how ordering at Starbucks is like managing cloud infrastructure

It's turned into a completely artificial and useless community because Microsoft chased the same growth and engagement metrics as Facebook did, now no one considers it to be a place for serious discussion.

In my view, LinkedIn has never really been a place for serious discussion.

> If you're a job seeker, most of the jobs are fake for pretend growth optics.

Maybe, but it continues to be one of the best places to find work.

Yeah, just not work you want to do

Yeah I would say I've gotten basically all my jobs through LinkedIn, over a fifteen year career where I've moved around a lot.

Where is? I've gotten about 2 interviews via Linkedin, wellfound has little which are the two I know most, Indeed is more useless than even LinkedIn.

I used to have decent luck with Who is hiring threads but not recently as there's relatively little for mid level engineers.

The job market is completely out of whack

Who is hiring has become a scam. I followed it for years and lately I noticed a large cohort of companies (including YC startups) doing shadow listings. The same positions being constantly advertised, month by month, not being filled in this job market?

I hardly doubt it is legit. I do not know why they are doing it, are they scraping data or just showing off, some are plain scammers but it is visible and HN doesn’t help by not allowing discussions about it.

My suggestion is to have a separate discussion thread so people can be aware of it and share their experiences.

Ghost jobs are a real thing, and they create so much noise and make it harder to find the signal when job searching. Also, a lot of job search websites don't even have a category for "remote anywhere." When they say "remote" what that usually means is "remote in the USA" or "remote in the EU" which isn't helpful to someone living outside of those regions.

It's good for connecting through the network and picking up new projects. I have a small ~100 people network and even I get results. Stricly through my network, not jobs, not direct service requests or their sales tools.

They could even make it more useful if they'd put actual thought in their paid Sales Navigator product, currently I find it hard to make it useful without better filtering and blacklisting mechanisms.

Though I'm put in a strange situation with the EU intent to roll out age verification, as LinkedIn might force me to verify through Thiel's Persona platform. Which I very much would not want to do, and have to plan for some form of exit strategy while still having a way to network professionally.

As far as AI content goes, the platform is drowning in it. I can only hope that once the AI Act disclosure requirements comes into play at least I can flag content that is not AI tagged.

I also prefer to have a smaller network of people I actually know. I haven’t found LinkedIn to be a very valuable channel for finding new clients, but it’s always nice to see past colleagues being successful at finding new roles or starting new ventures, and occasionally it’s been helpful for finding someone to provide a reference for me or vice versa.

For reasons unknown, LinkedIn seems to have decided that I’m not me a few months ago and blocked my account, though it would apparently be willing to reconsider as long as I provide whatever it is that Persona wants these days. (Evidently contacting me directly via my company — where my role as one of the directors is a matter of public record and my email address was listed in my LinkedIn profile — was too much trouble. :sigh:) Since I have no interest in giving any personal information to Persona, I no longer use LinkedIn and remain blissfully ignorant of all the AI-driven content that I keep seeing complaints about, but I do miss the occasional good news stories about people I actually know. I should probably send a formal GDPR request at some point, since my profile is probably quite misleading by now.

I found smashing the "not interested in this" button consistently for a few days greatly reduced "slop about AI" if not AI slop. It's irksome that so many people are having convo's with ChatGPT about "What AI all means" who don't know enough to have a worthwhile opinion and then posting blog posts based on this as if anyone cares. I hardly see it anymore. But then again, I am just on LinkedIn to post photos and connect with students because... they're the last LIONs.

> LinkedIn is totally useless at this point.

I agree, though in the context of this thread I'd add that LinkedIn was already useless before LLMs.

The site was already lost to nearly infinite corporate bro platitude posting long before LLMs started to see widespread use.

LLMs likely increased the overall amount of worthless posts on LinkedIn by a significant amount, but I don't think they changed the percentage as very nearly 100% were already worthless for a decade or so now.

> Microsoft chased the same growth and engagement metrics as Facebook

Yep. My LinkedIn feed is now polluted with the same political, rage content that made me exit Facebook 10 years ago. It sucks.

Came here to say the same thing which I was pretty shocked at. Engaging in flame wars on a site that's supposed to be for professionals was really eye opening.

I barely go on there any more its gotten so bad.

It’s so bad I can’t even believe they allow it. It’s just slop everywhere, even the posts complaining about AI slop are also AI slop which is pretty incredible.

Where are you all successfully looking for jobs? Indeed was even worse then LinkedIn.

Though LinkedIn really pissed me off a few weeks ago when it popped up something saying I shouldn't apply for a job because it doesn't match my profile well.

If you're a job seeker - create a prototype as close to a problem that the target company may be solving - call them, and show them. Works a charm.

I've managed to get quite a few interviews through LinkedIn jobs, though I'm looking for DevOps roles in particular, which may be an exception to the rule.

I hate LinkedIn so I wanna agree with you but it's actually a good place to get preliminary info. I doubt anyone actually reads the long feed content, though.

I'm pretty sure the rot was festering floridly well before the msft acquisition

Beyond the OP's AI-written or AI assisted distinction, I'm also noticing people mimicking LLM's speech patterns. I've read blogs from people who I'm quite sure are above pasting AI output directly into their words who nevertheless are sounding more and more like AI as the sum of all their conversations with Claude begins to rub off on them (myself included, probably)

I have noticed that sometimes in lists I have had the "The ... Solution: ..." sort of repetition. It is probably pre-existing but now that LLMs overuse it I actually am trying to adapt my speech patterns to not, because patterns LLMs overuse quickly become very grating to me.

I caught myself saying "push back" the other day. I've never said it before, it's a Claude-ism.

That's a corporate phrase that predates the current llm stuff along with things like ping, circle back,table that

Is it? I'd never heard it until Claude (or maybe Gemini was where I first heard it from). Any idea of the time frame when it started being spoken?

At least 5-10 years. Like my whole career.

The llms usually remind me of how corporate people talk

Reach out to tayo42, and they can provide some color.

Learnings, solutioning, synergy

Ideation.

We no longer meet, we jump on a call.

damn forgot about ideation lmao

"what is your ask" instead of "what is your question."

I think we're going to have to take this ... offline

These are different to me. An ask is when you expect some action from the person. A question is for an answer.

Right, but I hadn't really heard it before until I started using AI daily.

This shows that a lot of neologisms that people think of as ‘AI speak’ are often older and common terms but from an unfamiliar domain (like the corporate world or academia).

I suppose it stands to reason: LLMs were trained on human writing, and overuse certain tropes and patterns because those patterns are commonly represented in human writing. But many people aren't particularly adept writers, and they're going to turn to AI to either do their writing or inform how they write. The trope ends up reinforcing itself as people just start to think that AI output is just what normal writing looks like.

> overuse certain tropes and patterns because those patterns are commonly represented in human writing.

That's factually untrue. Give me a link to a pre-2020 piece of writing that sounds like an LLM.

The actual prose is ham fisted, but the structural bits - “why it matters” headings and bulleted content are traditional clickbait. Compare to “the results may surprise you” and similar stock phrases that we roll our eyes at. This stuff has always hooked people so it’s unsurprising that RLHF got its way.

If you want examples look at popular DIY magazines from a decade ago, they’re full of this sort of material where every article subheading has a catchy sentence.

There's something called RLHF.

I think this is just a sign that AI is now participating in the normal evolution of language over time. Language has always been about imitating... someone or some group comes up with a word/phrase/saying and uses it, other people hear/read it, and if they like it and/or find it useful, they incorporate it into their lexicon. This process is constant, and words and phrases are tweaked and morphed over the years as trends come and go.

Now, AI is participating in that process. It reads human words, and some of those words end up getting used more based on the algorithm, and then people read those words and copy some of them. This will feed back in to the AI as it ingests more content, and the feedback cycle is complete.

So what you're saying is the evolution of language is now being developed by the quirks of a particular floating point architecture?

I think that's kinda wonderful, actually.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754

Skullface from MGS5 predicted this. Hideo Kojima sends his regards.

> Beyond the OP's AI-written or AI assisted distinction, I'm also noticing people mimicking LLM's speech patterns.

I wonder if long disfavored words like "ain't" might make a comeback as proofs of humanity.

If they do, then AI writing will incorporate them.

> If they do, then AI writing will incorporate them.

Eventually, but at least for something like "ain't" the hill to climb to get there will probably be a lot higher, because you've got decades if not centuries of explicit discouragement and very little presence in existing formal writing (and maybe online writing period).

The more durable proof of humanity will probably be hyper rapid slang evolution, but that's going to have the downside of social fragmentation and making the past less legible. If slang changes rapidly over the course of a year, will anyone still remember the slang from 10 years ago to understand an old post?

One thing I have yet to see on the mainstream AI platforms is a combination of foul language, dirty jokes, rule34 and racial slurs. 4chan-GPT and local LLM's excluded. Perhaps require Rule34 and foul language as proof. There's probably a way to jailbreak that for a little bit but it would get patched.

Lately I have seem some Reddit posts with bullet points. I know it's a Power Point cliche, but that style almost never showed up on Reddit until about a year ago. I think a lot of those posts are AI-generated.

For a while I worked on defects for a web app at a large corporation. Users would submit walls of text, with a lot of unneeded details. A lot of people need help organizing their thoughts.

> I'm also noticing people mimicking LLM's speech patterns.

I've noticed this happening to myself. I use Claude Code quite a bit at work, and Claude tends to favor certain phrases, like, "the smoking gun", that I didn't use very often before. After encountering phrases like that frequently, I've found myself incorporating some of them into my own speech.

It is the opposite for me. AI loves terms like "you've just hit upon ..." or "it's the holy grail" or "The X Trap" so much that I internally cringe when I see them, and would avoid using them.

“An honest caveat…”

A lot of AIisms in writing are annoying to me, but Claude has completely ruined the words "real", "honest', and "genuine" for me.

I'm feeling the same way. People naturally pick up writing habits from what they read, especially if they haven't really developed their own style yet. So it seems only natural that, after spending a lot of time reading AI generated text, some of those patterns start creeping into their own writing.

The less established someone's writing style or vocabulary is, the more susceptible they probably are to that influence. I don't necessarily see it as inherently good or bad. People have always picked up habits from the things they read. AI is just another source of influence, alongside books, blogs, journalists, or other writers. Some influences are great, and some are less so.

Reddit has 13% bots? I dont believe it, reddit is swarmed with engagement farms and auto reply bots

how are they built, farmed ? residential proxies ?

Clarify your question?

Are you asking how are they built? I wouldnt know, but ive been offered services to engage in reddit marketing

It probably depends upon where you're looking. I never go to the front page, or even mildly popular subreddits for that matter. Ignoring the bot used for moderation, I would be surprised if 1% of the traffic on the subreddits I visit is generated by bots. It wouldn't surprise me if most of Reddit was like that, but you won't hear about them since they aren't the focus of everyone's attention.

Most bots on reddit are too cheap to use LLMs, from when I moderated most seemed to just have harvested a bunch of old comments and links that they reposted.

AI has just accelerated what has always been out there. LinkedIn has more or less always been a place where people write scripted BS stories, AI just made it a lot easier.

I don't like this "just" framing. It's like saying that crushing orphans was always a thing and Microsoft Orphan Crusher 2000 is just making it easier.

It's a qualitative change. It used to cost time and effort to produce slop, which gave genuine content a fighting chance. Now, the cost is basically zero, so there's no limit to how much trash you can produce.

Not on linkedin, anyone sincereposting there was swing at rain bands.

It's been Microsoft Orphan Crusher 360+ with copilot for a good long while now...

I think MS is mixing up the Xbox and Office ordinals.

i feel for buzzfeed

Making things easier (or cheaper) is the entire point of AI. If AI is great because it makes writing software easier (or cheaper), then AI is also terrible when it makes publishing slop easier (or cheaper).

Can confirm, this pushed me to delete the LinkedIn a few months ago and haven't looked back. It was at one time a professional portfolio, now I consider it a huge red flag if a company even questions why I do not have a LinkedIn. If you want references I will provide them. Social media is not a job requirement for any position I'm interested in.

> and haven't looked back

I did the same but I'm aware that LinkedIn is probably how people got in touch with me in the past, eventually leading to a job. So I'm waiting before not having looked back until the next time I need a job :) Regardless, it's not the world I want to live in anymore so you just gotta disconnect.

Does LinkedIn lead to jobs?

I don't know how else these people could have found me.

It amusing that Musk attempted to reverse his purchase of Twitter by citing the number of bots, and then research like this comes out alleging that now 29% of the X's long form articles are fully AI.

It's not exactly the same thing, of course, but still interesting the extent to which this type of content is viewed as the business opportunity for him.

Dead internet theory is becoming real. I’m looking forward to the elections coming up. Not many times I get to completely disengage from every online entity. Every time I post online I just assume I am talking to a LLM, with the elections I get to stop assuming.

Maybe I don't use LinkedIn that much, but I saw it especially on X and Reddit... Just today I was on a Reddit post and saw so many AI sloppish comments from people trying to farm karma

Twitter and Reddit were already on their way to being terrible, but the automation of the worst of what those places were becoming is now available to everyone.

yeah I've been saying the same, AI has multiplied the blast radius

I really miss the old internet. Thinking back, it was awesome. Even the beginning of social networks. I remember how amazed I was by things like Friendfeed. And it felt like things were only getting more awesome all the time. Even technologies like web sockets felt like it would make the Internet even more interactive and magical. I guess we're never going back to that.

I think it's hilarious. LinkedIn is rushing to de-legitimize themselves so hard that they're inventing a new market for someone else to step into. Apparently indeed doesn't want to take it... not sure what's going on there.

But that's LinkedIn working as intended.

Nobody thinks they are about to read an actual analysis of some industry relevant development. People aren't there to provide advice about how to "connect to your true self" either.

You post on LinkedIn to say "hey I'm alive, and I'm around for this kind of thing". Even if you are just commenting, people will see you. When you post something, people look at your CV, and they are either going to offer you to interview for a job or other business opportunity.

The actual content matters very little. Most of it is people saying "hey I'm still a lawyer, don't forget me next time you need one".

I find it ok once you heavily filter the content. But you need to put in a lot of effort.

The average type of person that still engages on LinkedIn won't even notice, so there's that...

The only thing good to come out of LinkedIn is Kafka. That's it. I deleted my account about a year ago. It does suck, I lost all those "network connections" from past contracts and employers. It's so hard to keep up with people now. So many people rely on those dang third party sites. It did cause harm to me by leaving it, as I can't find a job. I have no idea how to find one anymore. That site got so bad that it became useless and predatory. It beat me down and caused my depression to worsen. I had to leave. I couldn't handle all the fake jobs, the calls that never happened, the constant filling out of applications (hey, Workplace you suck too, why can't we just allow each employer to see our resume when asked and not have 100+ accounts? Yeah, you're harvesting for others as well), the constant messaging from fake recruiters, the fake articles, the HR worshiping sycophants with their cringe posts... you know the list. It goes on an on. Ok, I'm done rambling. I'm depressed again. I'll run out of $ soon and then...

Just wanted to say I feel ya man. I've been LONG term unemployed also. In my 40s now and my life is continually circling the drain. Wish I had good advice to give, but there is none to be found. There's not much hope out there and things are only going to get worse as we are headed into economic collapse. The world is in a really, really shitty place right now.

LinkedIn has always been a weird and uncanny place, LLMs somehow managed to make that effect much worse and unsettling.

Linkedin used to be useful primarily for job hunting and keeping in touch with those who you know professionally but would prefer not add to any personal social channels (I dont need my coleagues to know i was a key stakeholder at the mud party at Wacken metal fest). I am not sure anymore since everyone who posts seems to be an AI expert pontificating about all-things- AI and how they can help me learn more (just click their link in the comments!). Its truly become a mud pit of people stepping on each other to get noticed. With a shitty job market, I think the below two prominent suggestions from linkedin have truly "transformed" this site. "Members who post once per week on average see up to 4x more profile views." "Members who comment once per week on average see up to 3x more profile views."

Even posting a polite congratulatory comment to someone you admire is now also being exploited for self gain and views.

AI content is everywhere period, conditioning people and other AI in the propagation of more AI content.

I started to see articles about mycorrhizal fungi pop up on sites and LLMs. In January of 2026 an evolutionary biologist won a prize regarding the fungi, there were some interviews and media items surrounding it. But then I could trace the original media items to AI content aggregators, which led to other AI generated posts about mycorrhizal fungi, and some of that entered LLM training data, causing LLMs to bring up the topic.

And here I am, a human, writing about it, which may get consumed into training pipelines and help disseminate the idea into the future even further.

LinkedIn is really the first place I experienced LLM-generated content at scale. I did not know it at the time. I just figured, because the corporate world tends to adopt standards/templates and coalesce around a certain lingo, that this was the way people were posting to LI social media. But indeed as I later found out, there were many classic LLM tells built into all those posts.

Of course, I invariably found those LLM posts to be vacuous and pointless and so it was very easy to begin skimming right past them as I figured out they were cut from the same cloth.

To LinkedIn's credit, though: in 2020 I landed "my pandemic job", a dream job that was 100% remote (thanks to the lockdowns) and had a 100% flexible schedule and I had a really great time with the enjoyable work I was doing.

This job was somehow landed through LinkedIn. To this day, I cannot recall how or when I applied to the company. But I know I was filling out "1-Click Apply" forms there, and I had splashed up my involvement with the community college (though I would not actually graduate from college for another 3 years) and eventually a recruiter telephoned me to ask if I was interested. And as I was juggling some crazy issues in my personal life along with the pandemic lockdowns, I had to assure the recruiter multiple times: yes I'm interested, no please do not hang up, yes please let us continue with your process!

And it was that sort of tenacity that landed the initial job, and helped me hang on to this employer through M&A and multiple job-role changes. They formally terminated me about 4 times, but I was hired 5 times so it sort of evened out, I suppose.

If it were not for LinkedIn or community college, that recruiter never would've found me. I never would've got that job. My life would be so different, especially my pandemic-lockdown life! So grateful.

Ironically, my employer (EdTech industry) began to 100% embrace LLMs for their students and even offered a front-page LLM for students to ask about their homework, and other assignments. It was definitely crazy times for us, as we were the ones tasked with detecting plagiarism and other types of cheating in that homework, while students were being actively encouraged to tap into LLM-based resources for answers...

The second I see a rocket, star, or flame emoji, I stop reading. The overwhelming amount of bullshit on this site is fascinating. Bullshitters posting bullshit while other bullshitters react with “Interesting.”

They don't even remove the em dashes!

It is absolutely useless for actively searching for a job. Their job search is terrible and constantly shows unrelated results. The only useful part is that recruiters can contact you directly, which is how most jobs seem to be filled today.

This is, of course, an ad. It's written as-if their AI detection is flawless, but that seems unlikely. They have this in this article:

> our latest AI detection model, which achieves a 0.01% false positive rate

But, then in their linked article on false positives, they suggest you should have something far larger than most social media posts:

> The text is long enough (over a couple hundred words)

Can someone explain all the comments I see on LinkedIn that are clearly AI generated and are often just a single word like “claude” or similar?

Is this to boost the reach of the commenter or author of the post? Something else?

I see it often from a connection on LinkedIn who I know is a real person, but for some reason has given access to his account to an LLM. It’s baffling.

I believe those comment are here when the post say something like "comment claude if you want to receive my e-book"

It's still pretty bad at pixel art, and just has this generic look visually. I remember watching this video of this indy game developer that tried to hire an artist for some visuals for cover art for his game, and kept getting sent AI generated stuff by scammers. Finally he did find a real artist, and the cover was really good. But expensive.

Sometimes I'll search LinkedIn for posts on internet piracy. It's usually companies or those affiliated with companies promoting their anti-piracy product—typically streaming. I'd wager about 90% of them are straight-up, uninspired LLM-generated slop.

And so I'll comment asking them why it's okay to use a tool that was built on the backs of content it wasn't properly licensed to use to generate a post promoting an anti-piracy product. I'm yet to get a good response, if any. (Sorry for the word salad.)

I've started collecting some of these: https://josh.mn/anti-piracy

(Note: I went to federal prison for internet piracy)

LinkedIn is definitely flooded with AI slop, but we also need to keep in mind that Pangram really doesn't work that well. I just tried it, wrote a few sentences about my day, and it was flagged as AI-generated (which doesn't surprise me since these tools are known to easily flag writing from people whose native language is not English [1]). I am really suspicious of the 0.1% false positive rate they claim to achieve.

[1] https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-detectors-biased-against-no...

Tbh I’ve always treated it as three things:

1) Glorified Rolodex

2) Place too see which of my peers got promoted or moved dormant

3) Source material for /r/linkedinlunatics

Reading the crap in the feed has never been a thing

That's supposed to read moved company...autocorrect

Pangram claims they detect AI-generated content with 99.98% accuracy. I'm sceptical that it can be anywhere near that, but that's subjective based on my instinct, does anyone have more objective data on this accuracy?

Sponsored by a company that sells "LLM detection", funded by the same VCs that fund LLM products, destined to be snake oil because both sides converge by design, humans sound like LLMs and LLMs sound like humans.

I have several AI-content posters in my feed. Many of these are folks that previously used the term "thought leadership" non-ironically. I guess Claude and ChatGPT are the thought leaders now...

> I guess Claude and ChatGPT are the thought leaders now...

Even worse. Its actually the companies and their founders. See Musk's Grok for a extreme version of this.

The LinkedIn feed was Moltbook before anyone had the idea for Moltbook.

LinkedIn is Moltbook for humans on-behalf-of LLMs at this point

This is so apt

Watching YouTube recently and lots of videos are clearly entirely scripted by AI, shit analogies and all. You can almost hear the emdashes.

It really is painful watching.

On LinkedIn it's the only place where AI slop will be a huge improvement over the previous content.

I'm convinced that the internet is mostly dead at this point. Sites like reddit or this one don't ask people for their identity. Nothing on here could be real and we'd be none the wiser.

I'm real xutopia. I'm real.

I can't tell if your comment is LLM generated or not. What's the point of even reading comments anymore I should just ask claude what it thinks.

Social Media, Especially Reddit, is getting worse by the minute, vibe coding spam, AI bots filling subs with AI garbage links & comments, mods calling it quit because of the amount of junk they have to deal with it. IT IS EVERYWHERE... AI music on Spotify, AI pull requests on github, AI videos on youtube,... it's gonna kill the internet...

I might be a dog for all you know (though I neither confirm nor deny this), but I assure you I'm real.

Product and service reviews are completely useless now too, and have been for a while. Restaurant ratings are pure noise, everything is 4 stars and there is absolutely no correlation to the quality of food or service. None of it is real.

It's bleak out there, on the internet.

Good riddance. Reviews are just other people telling you how to live your life. Beyond it being subjective to the reviewer, there's really no upside in engaging with reviews. If it's a bad review, now you feel bad about having wanted to engage with something with abysmal scores (think: liking a movie then finding out it has a 32% on rotten tomatoes), or if it's a good review, it's useless because you were already going to engage with the thing being reviewed. You chose the restaurant for a reason, right? It sounded good.

We should get back to having our own experiences regardless of what the consensus says. If it looks good _to you_, it might just be good _for you_.

Apartment reviews are pretty fucking important when you're committing to live somewhere for at least a year. I don't want to find out that my complex is infested with roaches.

Maybe this would be ok with good consumer protection laws, but in some places honest reviews are the best hope you have of not wasting money on products that might fail some way or another.

Which (in the UK and Ireland) solve this for me. As I pay them every month and they don't take stuff from the companies, our interests are aligned.

I know have actually good white goods for the same money I paid for crap ones.

What? Why would you feel bad about a negative review of something you didn't create?

Either the product is something I was curious about and hadn't decided to spend time and money on yet, in which case a negative review might save me the trouble, or it's something I've already done and formed my own opinion about, in which case I'm probably not reading reviews.

Reading a review from Roger Ebert provided a lot of value to me - I knew generally his likes and dislikes and could use that information relationship to contextualize the review. I think reviews break down when you move from individual to aggregates. What does 34% really mean, maybe 90/100 reviewers hate horror, are under 25, all from a specific city? I really don't agree with your take that on reviews but I do think reviews in aggregate - where there is no relationship to the reviewer -- are problematic.

The reason why Roger Ebert or Gene Siskel's reviews had value is because they were real people with carefully considered and sometimes strongly-held opinions. That's never going to be true of the algo.

> Product and service reviews are completely useless now too

One relatively minor counterpoint: amazon has seemed to resolve their review squatting issue. Several years ago, there were companies selling one type of product and getting 4* reviews, then swapping all of the product details for a completely unrelated product, presumably with a huge markup. So you might think you were buying a 4* say, hot water thermos, but if you actually read the reviews, they would all be for a USB charger or something. All the recent reviews would be much lower.

I haven't seen this in a while now. Or maybe they're just better at it :/

If I can't tell the difference, why would it matter?

The problem is when I can eventually tell the difference.

I feel like it will only get worse, too. I don't want to waste my time responding to a bot so as a human it makes me less likely to participate.

I want a social media again where I actually just see my friends (my friends use Discord for this and it works okay).

The internet was dead before you or I or anyone else even realized that it could die. We're just zombies stumbling around in this undead wasteland, going through the motions that we used to do when it was still alive. Ironically, the thing that killed it were the tools people employed to keep the robots out.

Once those were in place, no one could ever follow in Google's footsteps, which meant search could never work again not even in theory. And the same robots that people were murdering the internet to keep out were welcomed in through the service entry and started writing all the content: now not only could search never work again, but there wouldn't be anything worth searching for. And if all of that wasn't enough to really depress you, there's the fact that social media made it impossible to ignore that none of us like each other very much.

The internet has never been more alive to me at this time, granted I spend very very little of my internet time on corporate internet but there are real communities out there. You might have to change your expectations (surprise! people don't post as often) but you can find a community if you want it, it just takes time and actual work filtering through the noise.

Get out of the corporate internet to find humans again.

LinkedIn content that hasn't been written by AI might as well have been.

There's a reason i read HN and not LI.

I feel like we're weeks or months away from stronger AI detection pushing it down on these platforms.

LinkedIn content has always been useless crap; now it's just AI generated crap. No much difference.

The LinkedIn post pop-up has an AI button at the bottom. It's no wonder people are using it.

Oh yeah I can't wait for the next election. Things get so toxic when money/power is involved.

money/power will not be involved in the next election? Not sure if I completely follow your comment.

I think they mean ai content will make it much worse.

Also, in case you didn't already know, I saw a headline announcing that the sky is usually blue.

Honestly I can't tell the difference with LinkedIn. Feels the same as it's ever been

And LinkedIn is probably the platform where AI writing is easiest to spot without a detector

Does anyone actually use LinkedIn as social network? Excluding the job browsing

I too loathe LinkedIn. However it kinda feels like you have to use it if you’re a freelance senior developer and want to find projects. At least that’s what many B2B people say.

So I’m wondering: long term freelancers who make a living out of freelancing (and I’m not talking employee type of positions where you’re basically an employee but get paid on invoices), where and how do you acquire customers if not on LinkedIn?

How do you not participate in the LinkedIn AI slop and still fill your pipeline?

Not too surprising unfortunately. LinkedIn is all about the hustle, and for most people that's about putting as little as effort as possible into 'content' you hope will pay off. Mix a platform known for the get rich quick mindset with a piece of tech designed to make creating things as effortless as possible, and you get LinkedIn.

That said, I think there are two things worth noting about that site:

1. The content was mostly slop before AI became a thing, AI has just increased the amount of it tenfold. 2. It's still not the worst content on the site. As one check of LinkedIn Lunatics shows all too well, there's a depressingly large number of people who seem to treat the site like a personal diary, and rant about their political views on what's supposed to be a business focused network.

At this point, LinkedIn is basically Twitter/X wearing a suit and tie.

As for the other sites mentioned... yeah, those track too. Medium and Reddit were already being gamed like there was no tomorrow before AI entered the picture, now it's just become even easier for the parasites to flood them with garbage. Twitter/X is basically the wild west at this point, and Substack seems to appeal pretty heavily to the types of people that absolutely love AI and everything about it.

True about AI slop pre-AI. Before 2026 my LinkedIn feed was mostly about how to get rich buying real estate. AI is an improvement.

I would like to remove the AI-generated content and any low-effort content from my LinkedIn feed. There can be some great stuff in there but a lot of it isn't worth my attention. Probably going to explore some browser plugins with that because the algorithm doesn't seem to do the best job giving me content that is interesting to me. It may be giving me topics I enjoy reading about now (AI) but not the level of "thought leadership" I want. Substack is better for that these days.

I write both places because I enjoy writing.

Can they add hackernews to their study analysis? And do a measure over time?

What if the people that post on LinkedIn are actually just being themselves

A social media without penalising mechanism will always favour spam.

Fortunately, LinkedIn writing was always so awful that no-one notices.

AI generated article to promote some product. What a great meta proof.

To be fair, is AI content on LinkedIn really a step backwards?

It's especially "funny", when "Senior" software engineers post AI spam, to inform you about solving Fibonacci recursively, as if this was just the first day they learned about the Fibonacci sequence.

The question is not whether something is AI generated. That's the default state now. Question whether it is human, the economics are exceedingly in the favor of this new normal. https://javiergonzalez.io/blog/the-economics-of-slop/

Same here, I hate it. Instead of just reading I find myself also dedicating brain power trying to decide if it's worth reading or not based on the first few sentences... if someone can't put in the effort to actually write something themselves I absolutely do not want to put in the effort to read it.

Really no different than the content that is usually on LinkedIn. It's been a worthless dumpster fire for ten years at least.

I love LinkedIn. Biggest Art Project in Human Existence!

24/7 The Yes Men feed https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yes_Men

Pangram doesn't work, and I wish people would stop treating it as gospel (but the AI/anti-AI grift is real). Here's a fun paradox: I can literally tell ChatGPT: "Say X" and it will say "X"—so that's a case where content is both AI generated and not. What if it changes a few words? Moves some sentences around? Where does something go from human- to AI-generated? (This is the classic Sorites paradox.)

Pangram tries to look for common patterns (rule of three, em dashes, etc.) but these are heuristic methods and not to be taken as gospel. There is no provable method to make a distinction between AI and human-generated other than the fact that AI-generated text tends to reek of pseudo-intellectual undergrad with a thesaurus.

Pangram does work, in the specific sense that when it says something was AI authored it is vanishingly unlikely that it was written by a human (who was not deliberately trying to write like an AI), and IMO getting people to recognize that we actually do have a decent solution in this space now is pretty important if we want the Internet to remain a place for humans and not just bot swarms.

> rule of three, em dashes, etc

You appear to be misinformed about how Pangram specifically works, it is not based on pattern detection of that sort. I recommend reading their whitepaper, it's a pretty understandable explanation of exactly how they trained their classifier.

> Pangram does work

It's trivial to see how many people think Pangram is absolute trash[1] (because it is).

> You appear to be misinformed about how Pangram specifically works, it is not based on pattern detection of that sort. I recommend reading their whitepaper, it's a pretty understandable explanation of exactly how they trained their classifier.

I did read their paper (which is, by the way, very scant on details), and they trained their classifier in the laziest way possible: here's a chunk of "human-written" text and here's a chunk of "AI-written" text, put them in the right bucket, and do this a zillion times. Literally zero sophistication. Also: what do you think "pattern recognition" is, if not a "classifier"?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/1rm11rs/pangram_c...

I just tried it, created an account, and wrote a few sentences about how my day went. These sentences got classified as AI assisted, so clearly their classifier doesn't work that well.

Was just thinking today, -- happened to login to LinkedIn, open it up and the entire front page is just AI slop being applauded and liked with people seriously interacting with it as if it's somebody didn't just shit it out in 20s with zero effort. The whole thing needs to die so badly.

On Instagram, I'll get fed "real" content, but you read the description and it's this giant 3-4 paragraph thing that I don't bother to read because I know with certainty that it's AI slop. Before AI, the descriptions of sports videos or meme videos were 2 sentences, now they're entire theses.

The only people left reading this crap are people that still haven't caught up with the concept of AI slop

What I agree with in this article is that there is shit ton of slop on the internet today. What I disagree with is that if pangram says it's human, then it's not AI. That is hardly the case. Pangram fails spectacularly in detecting AI.

https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/ai_detector_fails/blob/main/... - I posted this link in another thread the other day. I might do more of these tests in the upcoming days and put universal jailbreaks for people to fool these 'AI detectors'.

To some extent, having slop in feeds is a platform’s choice, either implicit or explicit. In LI’s case it seems to be explicit since they added a slop button. YouTube has a similar problem with Shorts.

..and YouTube Music

It's like a burgoo [1]. A steaming cauldron of community slop.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgoo

Hey, at least a bowl of burgoo tastes good, unlike some community slops.

LinkedIn has become an AI-slopped wasteland. It’s like the opposite of when boomers found Facebook, which was the weirdest melting pot of zero-integrity posts and comments.

Now we have these tech-savvy people generating worthless images and producing generic, emoji-infested takeaways.

I read through LinkedIn posts and it's AI slop all the way down, it's horrendous. Every post is either written entirely by AI or mostly written by AI.

My LI feed is almost entirely AI slop at this point. I have second-hand embarrassment for all the people who are obliviously broadcasting "thought leadership" that is transparently the work of AI to their entire networks.

the enslopification is pretty obnoxious.

almost all platforms are like this now. Every active player in each of these platform is trying to get the most eyeballs in their content / profile. and the silent scrollers are not contributing anything else anyway.

We've societally come to the consensus that, we want to reward a race to the bottom slop. passive scrollers by not doing anything about it, active posters by contributing to it.

but there is no way else to win in this game.

A friend of mine writes the most human curated thoughtful newsletter about AI, spending 100 hours. and maybe 200 people know of its existence.

LinkedIn is basically unusable at this point. I actually did used to use it a fair amount before but I've since deleted it and just use email notifications to see any notifications from recruiters.

What I don't get is how these people don't feel shame in their super obvious blatant use of LLMs for everything, even responding to posts. Maybe it's just me but when I'm attaching things to my name like that, I would absolutely not want everything to be obviously slop shit. Do they think people can't tell or something? I know at least every technical person I know can immediately tell (most of the time) when writing is LLM generated.

These are the rubes who buy into the desperate messaging that AI is "inevitable". It doesn't occur to them that their behavior is absurd and empty because they think it's what everyone else is doing too. Why question a decision you see as outside the boundary of your free will?

" but we don't believe it's inevitable." Best get believing pal, because not only is it inevitable, it represents the last evolution in our societies output. There will be slop from now until eternity. Recalibrate your aesthetics, because everything is going to look like model output. The detection model is flawed, and snake-oil at best. 仕方がない (shikata ga nai).

honestly, im glad that linkedin is getting nuked. no one needs that content feed anyways

yeah i’ve been looking for online social spaces that have some sort of human verification to reduce my slop exposure. the PRSN app that launched recently seems promising but it’s empty rn.

I think it would require people create some naughty limericks, make foul jokes, rule34, rekt and ethnic slurs. Those seem to be the only things that mainstream AI have been tuned to avoid. There's probably a way to jailbreak that for a little bit but it would get patched.

I mean, who the hell ever read that utter garbage on LinkedIn anyway?

Now let's stir the shit further, on LinkedIn group the posters of AI content by country/company.

This isn't just a spam problem, it's a technology making mediocre content economically viable at unprecedented scale. /s

If I see a post that starts with this type of sentence structure I don't even bother to read any of it. I feelt like this happens on LinkedIn the most, so I'm happy to finally have some data to back up my observations.

I quit enjoy it tbf

People here need to stop complaining about the train, and get on board. It's easier than ever before to build a network that can later be used for distribution and monetization. Does it really matter that content is authentically organic? We are tech people after all...our lives are practically synthetic and artificial. It's like getting upset because one artificial sweetener is sweeter than another.

If anything, I think people are triggered by it all because it exposes something more deep in people -- most people don't want to admit most of their lives have been wasted in front of a computer. But here we are. So stop complaining and start coming up with more creative uses of AI writing if you have a problem with it.

"Building a network" is getting harder and may soon become completely impossible. Apparently when the total number of people who are interested in you or whatever you're selling doesn't increase and are instead diluted by piles of automatically-generated, void-filling slosh, it gets harder to spot what's really valuable. Everyone had to wade through the swamps now, so instead of surrendering more of their time to try and find anything worthwhile, people retreat from these places into their own communities.

I'm sure none of that matters though. You've already shown what really matters, the only thing that's valuable in the world - money. Maybe if those naysayers just shut up and got into the slurry pit like the rest of us normal people, they'd be convinced not to care about silly things that aren't money. After all, using a computer is 'artificial' or something. Even if you used those screens to connect with real people or do things for someone, the computeriness means that you might as well forego everything and everyone now. It was on a screen after all. So stop caring and play along with my numbers going up party. I may not be striving to do anything but value extraction, but at least it's going to make the most important number really big.

Very bold of you to think we aren’t already past the point where “what’s valuable” is only human created. Maybe some truly exceptional people can create works that are exceptional but it’s only a matter of time before the models usurp them too. Instead of shaking your fist at a world you don’t like, make peace with it.

"most people don't want to admit most of their lives have been wasted in front of a computer."

On the contrary, because I spent so much of my youth in front of a computer, most technical things are second-nature to me. While I see large amounts of people laid off in the tech industry, my net worth and income is only growing.

"So stop complaining and start coming up with more creative uses of AI writing if you have a problem with it."

Using AI/LLM takes about 1% of my brain power. Cobbling a bunch of scripts together to basically ask questions to an LLM is well within the skillsets of many people in the tech industry.

The people with the knowledge and skills pre-LLM will be dominating the industry, getting paid the most, and will be employed for years to come. The rest will be on the unemployment line.

Overly relying on AI going forward will only atrophy your skills and make you completely reliant on the companies providing the tokens.

Except if you use open models, on your own hardware. 90% of the open models are good enough. You sound just like the assembly programmers did back when C++ (and later, untyped languages like Python and Ruby) came out. It's just another form of the idea "I suffered, so you must suffer too."

I am just like you -- I spent most of my youth in front of a computer. I have the skills. Coded for years by hand. I am glad I don't have to anymore. And you should be too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com