AI Was Born to Blog on LinkedIn

Like everywhere else on the internet, LinkedIn is awash in AI-generated content. It’s a perfect fit. As first reported by Wired, a new study has found that more than half of the posts on LinkedIn were constructed using some form of generative AI. Anyone who has spent any amount of time on LinkedIn won’t be shocked.

Wired had exclusive access to a study performed by AI detection startup Originality AI. According to the publication, Originality scanned 8,795 public English LinkedIn posts that are more than 100 words long and published from January 2018 to October 2024. Of those, 54 percent were likely AI-generated. According to the study, there was a huge spike in 2023 when OpenAI released ChatGPT but it’s leveled off.

LinkedIn is a social media site aimed at helping people get a job and build a professional network. Interactions on the site have long felt like an unnecessary corporate meeting or sterile job interview. The site has been steeped in corporate culture and stilted corporate speech—that kind of dittoing aggressively bland talk that’s drained of all color and joy. It’s the kind of writing LLMs are perfect at replicating.

In the corporate world, it’s best to talk in buzzwords and jargon. LinkedIn even has a tool built in for premium subscribers that lets them cut out third-party sites like ChatGPT. After entering a minimum of 20 words into a post, subscribers can click a button and use AI to repackage their corporate content for the world.

In a world where pictures of shrimp Jesus are offending us on Facebook and grotesque Musk-as-chad pictures flood X, AI has found its perfect home on LinkedIn. But not all are happy. “Some people engaged positively, appreciating the clarity and structure of the posts. Others were skeptical or critical, often focusing on the fact that AI was involved rather than the content itself,” Entrepreneur Zack Fosdyck told Wired. “I find it fascinating how polarizing this technology can be, especially since tools like calculators or spellcheck, which are also forms of assistance, are widely accepted.”

The difference is that calculators and spellcheck do not serve to substitute and replace basic human interaction. Context matters too. It’s impossible for an AI-generated LinkedIn post to offend me. But if I caught a friend using Google’s new systems to generate a personal response to a text message? I’d be pissed.

Yesterday, Lance Eliot—a “world-renowned AI scientist” who once appeared on 60 Minutes—published an op-ed on Forbes that advocated for using ChatGPT to make Thanksgiving peaceful. Why bother engaging with your family when you can have an AI do it for you?

The post reads like ChatGPT wrote it. It’s got all the hallmarks: a lead that sounds like it’s written to satisfy a high school English class grading rubric, bullet points that walk through the essay’s talking points, and calls to action that focus on the non-controversial. At the end of the essay, Eliot offers a final piece of advice for those with an angry turkey-day guest who just wants to argue.

“A last resort might be to ask the person to go somewhere that offers solitude at your event and have them argue with generative AI,” he says. “Have the person engage in their heated argument with AI. They can do this until the cows come home. It might allow them to vent their anger. The AI can take it, don’t worry about that. Once they’ve done all their chirping and whirling, they can rejoin the group if they are going to henceforth be peaceful and thankful.”

I like to think (and the sooner the better) of a cybernetic meadow where people who would exile difficult people into a room to battle with generative AI are themselves exiled to a land of AI-generated LinkedIn posts. Let the Eliots of the world retreat from the complexities of life into a land of corporate speak and ChatGPT-led interactions.

Give me the meat of human interaction. I want the fights over politics with difficult relatives, the anger and sadness of genuine human conversation, and all the joys and pains that come with it. Let the anodyne world of LLMs live on LinkedIn. Do not bring it into your life or your home.