alt Hacker NewsAI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn
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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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
The average type of person that still engages on LinkedIn won't even notice, so there's 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.
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...
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...
On the other hand, I find it kind of concerning that it's so much better to have serious discussions (eg scientific or emotionally charged) with a bot than with any human at all, online or in real life.
Also, in case you didn't already know, I saw a headline announcing that the sky is usually blue.
Oh yeah I can't wait for the next election. Things get so toxic when money/power is involved.
The LinkedIn feed was Moltbook before anyone had the idea for Moltbook.
Honestly I can't tell the difference with LinkedIn. Feels the same as it's ever been
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
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
Now let's stir the shit further, on LinkedIn group the posters of AI content by country/company.
It's like a burgoo [1]. A steaming cauldron of community slop.
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/
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.
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.
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.
AI generated article to promote some product. What a great meta proof.
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.
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.
I mean, who the hell ever read that utter garbage on LinkedIn anyway?
On LinkedIn it's the only place where AI slop will be a huge improvement over the previous content.
Really no different than the content that is usually on LinkedIn. It's been a worthless dumpster fire for ten years at least.
" 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).
[flagged]
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
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.
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.