In many ways, browsing the front page of LinkedIn is both a blast from the past and a glimpse into the ever-expanding frontier of AI: not only are 2000s Facebook memes back, but text-generated slop made by large lanaguage models is in!
Increasingly scattered between job updates from your colleagues are mindless blurbs, videos and courses made not with the great human mind, but with stylized prompts that want you to click and buy. The usual suspects: resume guides, emoji-baked anecdotes and, apparently, slideshows of inspirational carrots.
Part of this feels familiar — bad content has predated AI. Pyramid schemes did just fine before chatbots. LinkedIn itself is arguably late to the chase of monetizing generated content. What separates the supposedly professional app from, say, TikTok and Youtube AI channels, is its commodification of employment and the search for it. While AI continues to saturate social media, LinkedIn’s adoption of it more readily reveals the growing authority of machine learning.
As a networking app, LinkedIn promises career growth, new circles, and job opportunities. The company has streamlined the process of ‘playing the game,’ solidifying itself as a respected way to find — and boast — success. LinkedIn Premium sells a better game: from using a paid-for ‘InMail’ feature to reach recruiters, to generating content at the click of a button. (Premium users needn’t even get bogged down by reading, either; LinkedIn’s AI can summarize the hard-hitting literature of social media captions for them.)
Most notable is the endless surplus of AI-generated success stories, tips, and visual slop sprinkled throughout the feed. Why and how does a compilation of feeding fruit children — along with a sincerely ridiculous yet so fittingly LinkedIn-speak caption — make its way to the front page? You don’t go searching for this content; it finds you. The collision of Facebook humor, business, and new-age technology the home page pushes can be attributed to the truly crossgenerational aspect of LinkedIn, from middle schoolers who should be outside playing to genuine billionaires who have long since built their empires. And when AI hits the particular social media of LinkedIn, it unfolds in possibly the worst way ever.
The platform’s constant advertisement of Premium AI features, paired with heaps of recommended, pro-AI content (fittingly written by AI), highlights not only the ubiquity of artificial intelligence, but the proliferation of it. An endless, unnecessary stream of nearly identical posts hail AI as a savior in their job search and recommend prompts, all to the tune of selling their own course with a ridiculous AI-generated image to pair. Posts such as these are all prompted, misleading and extensive garbage that not only affirms (yes you are smart and may have done a thing), but promises (if you buy into this crap, maybe you can have the same dizzyingly long string of acronyms in your own LinkedIn bio!)
Perhaps the appeal of hitting “Generate” on a LinkedIn post is the speed at which it does that mundane grind of writing. Perhaps the appeal of AI comments, also a premium feature, is the sheer number it can pump out, rather than the person-to-person interaction LinkedIn once proposed.
To argue this is just the same as playing the game is to fail to recognize the game has long been lost in the first place.
The dystopian normalcy of AI slop highlights another changing dynamic. On one hand, an increasing bulk of what we casually consume has been produced by AI. And, on the other hand, the products we create ourselves — our work, our resumes, even our personal emails — are in turn consumed by AI. Your life, your identity, your right to live in this country are all evaluated just as increasingly by algorithms.
These are the same algorithms that Microsoft, Linkedin’s parent company, has turned to at the expense of employees. Despite its solid 18% revenue increase ($76.4 billion) to close its Q4, Microsoft has laid off over 15,000 of its workers this year. As the company turns its focus towards spending billions on AI data centers, it clearly doesn’t have many qualms laying off the very developers who created Copilot, its prime chatbot helper. Their reasoning? The same as the drive for AI in the first place: streamlining.
How can LinkedIn pride itself on its AI-powered model and job search when its own company cut thousands of lifelong careers for that same AI?
If AI helps people secure jobs, then why — despite over 300,000 layoffs of federal employees — is it a Holocaust-promoting Twitter chatbot that has risen the ranks of the Department of War?
The end game of LinkedIn’s new business model appears to be a Premium echochamber of AI posts, AI comments and AI tips on how to reach an AI recruiting audience. As of October, roughly 90% of employers now use AI to assess, filter and rank applicants. Getting your resume in front of a pair of human eyes might prove just as hard as getting an automated phone call to human ears.
What exactly keeps rolling on without us if we all buy into this? We seem to be out of the equation if AI just interacts with AI.
We aren’t emerging as the users of this technology, but rather, somehow, its fodder. And that meritocratic game they put you on? You were never set up to win. When the real winners of the game are those that profit off of your usage of their platforms, your data, your speech and writing style, you have become the product.
