That obnoxious LinkedInfluencer might be a bot

You open your LinkedIn feed to yet another 500-word post about how running a half-marathon holds so many valuable lessons for running a business.

It’s jam-packed with emoji, flowery adjectives, and it just might have been written by a bot, according to Wired.

• More than 54% of longer LinkedIn posts published in English are most likely AI-generated, according to AI detection startup Originality AI’s analysis.
• Originality scanned ~8.8k public LinkedIn posts 100+ words long and published between Jan. 2018 and Oct. 2024.
• The analysis found the amount of AI content spiked 189% at the beginning of 2023 — coinciding with the release of ChatGPT.

While LinkedIn itself doesn’t track the use of AI tools on its site, the company says that it does identify low-quality or duplicate content and stops it from being promoted broadly. 

And LinkedIn offers its own in-app AI tool to Premium users that lets them reword their content with the click of a button. 

AI gets social 

While LinkedIn is the perfect platform for AI’s slightly forced, jargon-filled writing to slip by unseen, AI-generated content is thriving across social media sites.

Mark Zuckerberg said AI-generated and AI-summarized content will become increasingly common across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, and that Meta’s AI chatbot is used by 500m+ users every month.

There is, of course, an obvious downside: 

The proliferation of AI-generated content inevitably leads to more low-quality slop clogging up our feeds.

Plus, confusing, ridiculous slop could be the best-case scenario — with dangerous misinformation being the worst.

AI-generated images on Facebook garner hundreds of millions of engagements, and an AI-generated image was one of the 20 most-viewed posts on Facebook in Q3 of 2023 with 40m views, according to a report from Stanford’s Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center.

So, as the AI slop keeps getting dished out in increasing quantities, stay cynical while scrolling. Also, we saw shrimp jesus, so you have to, too.