I understand that AI content will become more and more common over time, and trying to fight that flood is like trying to fight a literal flood, which is utterly useless, but especially this I believe the use case is something like: Bad idea.
As we recently reported, LinkedIn is developing new options that can generate AI posts, among other generative AI experiments. Nima Ouji You can find it in your app’s backend code.
As you can see in this example, LinkedIn’s AI Update Assistant, in this early iteration, prompts users to “share their ideas” in Composer and provides suggestions for the “first draft” of the post based on that.
Well, LinkedIn has actually shipped this and now some users have access to the new AI post generation tool within the app.
LinkedIn Product Director Keren Baruch explains:
“We hear you know most of what you want to say when it comes to posting on LinkedIn, but going from a great idea to a serious post can be difficult and time consuming. So we’re starting to test how members can use generative AI directly within her LinkedIn share box. First, you should share a summary of what you want to say in at least 30 words. This is your own thoughts and points of view and the heart of the post. You can then leverage generative AI to create the first draft. This gives you a solid foundation to review, edit, and create your own before you even click post.“
Oh, I mean, it’s not designed to be used as a tool to pretend you know what you’re talking about, but to express your thoughts in a consistent way. It just helps pretend.
Especially on a platform where people are looking to showcase their professional skills and abilities, it makes sense. Why can’t they easily spew out opinions and perspectives that don’t reflect their own knowledge and understanding?
This is my main concern with LinkedIn’s generated AI post prompts. It’s about making it incredibly easy for people to impersonate, post, and move around to create false representations of who they are or what they know. And since recruiters often value people’s presence on her LinkedIn during candidate research, this can potentially become a bigger problem, resulting in disastrous interviews, misplaced connections, and eventual rejections. may lead to
Of course, there’s a lot more to finding and hiring talent than just evaluating their presence on LinkedIn. As Baruch points out, first he has to write down 30 or so words, so not everything is AI-generated anyway.
But the precedent here is not good. LinkedIn basically tells people to use AI-generated posts. This removes the “social” element from “social media” (because there is no more human interaction) and at the same time invites imposters and scammers. Just tap and pretend that person isn’t someone.
There must be enough Hustle Culture imposters in the app already, right?
Among the various new generative AI elements on LinkedIn are: Overview of AI-generated profilesAI-assisted Duties, Generated AI Messages for Job Seekersand AI InMail Assistantthis is the worst.
It’s one thing to allow more and more machine-generated content to appear on our screens, it’s one thing to encourage it. Again, LinkedIn should be a place for people to publish their professional insights and knowledge.
In my view, this could significantly depreciate the value of this element.
But it’s here, tested with a small group of users before rolling it out more broadly. Good luck to all recruiters.
