- 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_.
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.
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.
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.
> Product and service reviews are completely useless now too
> 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 :/
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.
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...
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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 I would say I've gotten basically all my jobs through LinkedIn, over a fifteen year career where I've moved around a lot.
Yeah, just not work you want to do
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.
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.
In my view, LinkedIn has never really been a place for serious discussion.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_.
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.
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.
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.
> Product and service reviews are completely useless now too
> 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 :/
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.
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.
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).
I'm real xutopia. I'm real.
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.
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 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.
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754
Skullface from MGS5 predicted this. Hideo Kojima sends his regards.
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 pongo, circle back,table that
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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'.
The average type of person that still engages on LinkedIn won't even notice, so there's that...
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.
And LinkedIn is probably the platform where AI writing is easiest to spot without a detector
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.
What if the people that post on LinkedIn are actually just being themselves
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...
The LinkedIn feed was Moltbook before anyone had the idea for Moltbook.
LinkedIn is Moltbook for humans on-behalf-of LLMs at this point
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...
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.
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.
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...
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
Honestly I can't tell the difference with LinkedIn. Feels the same as it's ever been
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
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.
Now let's stir the shit further, on LinkedIn group the posters of AI content by country/company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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?
On LinkedIn it's the only place where AI slop will be a huge improvement over the previous content.
I mean, who the hell ever read that utter garbage on LinkedIn anyway?
Really no different than the content that is usually on LinkedIn. It's been a worthless dumpster fire for ten years at least.
the enslopification is pretty obnoxious.
" 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).
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.
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