Somehow i feel sad for this AI model. All the others are trained on authentic content and this boy gets socialised on the most shallow content imaginable. Poor, socially awkward AI.
Why on earth would you train AI on that? In the social media world it's already the closest thing resembling boring, unreadable machine generated content.
No matter what you ask it, it'll brag about what a great job it's doing answering you, announce that it's having a baby, then tell everybody that it's being let go because there are better AI. It'll thank a few key people who it worked with, and tell you that it's actually thrilled with this opportunity to take a break from answering your question, and will spend more time on its old hobby of being an online resume.
Because there is a huge market for resume builders and career guidance where AI can play a role. Using LinkedIn you can measure success and network performance and correlate that to the resume and posted content.
There's also real money in writing LinkedIn content that is believable enough for "influencers" to post. I'm currently contracting, and post on LinkedIn at least once a day, and I've added ~1k+ followers in the last month, but it takes effort. Meanwhile, those posts have gotten me work, and so if it was feasible for me to outsource it in a reputationally safe way, I'd consider it.
For me the bar for "reputationally safe" is really high because my market (cynical tech CTO's etc. don't respond well to things that sounds like ChatGPT) and so I don't expect to any time soon, but for many others that bar is pretty low as long as it's good enough for LinkedIn's algorithm to give it impressions.
>I'm currently contracting, and post on LinkedIn at least once a day, and I've added ~1k+ followers in the last month, but it takes effort. Meanwhile, those posts have gotten me work, and so if it was feasible for me to outsource it in a reputationally safe way, I'd consider it.
If you need to pay the bills and this helps, good for you.
But boy howdy does this sound terrible. It's amazing to me that there are people out there who take anything on LinkedIn seriously. I mean, it's not like the posts are inherently bad, but the entire point of the site is to "influence" and sell to each other. It's horrible. If I were looking for talent, it'd probably be the last site I'd use.
Are you ok to accept that you're probably an outlier?
Because while I have kind of the same opinion as you, I also know lots of (good and generally smart) people who say they learn a ton of useful work-related stuff from reading LinkedIn posts.
Not everyone is at the same point in their career, or has the same level of knowledge and confidence in their craft or job position. For some folks, reading thoughts and writings from more senior people can actually be beneficial..
And yes there's a lot of platitudes and BS on LinkedIn, but some people do put real effort into sharing actually useful information as well.
> people who say they learn a ton of useful work-related stuff from reading LinkedIn posts
I suspect this says more about what the reader doesn't know and their mastery of info self-exposure than it says about the contentfulness of LinkedIn posts*.
* Not counting content originating elsewhere re-posted on or linked to from LinkedIn.
So all LinkedIn posts are of the same quality then? Would you also say that all HN comments are of the same quality too? You're painting with an awfully big brush.
Look I get it, there's a lot of crap on LinkedIn for sure, and it's pretty obvious this crowd is generally against "influencers".. I also see no value in them generally speaking.
But it's reductive, and inaccurate, to say that there's zero value across the board on there and that every post is low-value influencer-spam. Not everyone is trying to build an audience or push their newsletter.
Some people just want to share their knowledge and interact with their professional peers, and for better or worse LinkedIn is the most known place to do that..
You could say the same thing about this place. Why are we all here?
> You could say the same thing about this place. Why are we all here?
Not to preen or self-promote or "network". Most here are anonymous.
Both of us use names, and you have the meethn and I have a "we are hiring" ... Still, I don't think either of us is here just to meet people or just to hire. My profile has only said that for a couple of the more than a decade I've been here.
I don't think anybody said influencers don't put effort in it. The only argument is that the added value by influencers is zero, be it on Instagram or LinkedIn, so if AI can take that kind of job the net loss is also zero. Of course of course there's an audience for influencers, like there was an audience at Tupperware shows, but they'll be happy to move on to the next fad so again zero loss.
Once again, AI will automate checkboxing tasks—-things that some people think some other people value so it has to be done even though basically no on values it so no one wants to do the soulless task.
Anecdotally, I think a fair chunk of writing CVs (and to a smaller degree, cover letters) is already outsourced. Adding an AI to the mix will only make things worse.
I have seen a number of CVs over the past few months that fall into two eye-rolling categories. First, those that have the same set of skills in the exact same order, and routinely sport identical expressions. Over time I've come to associate them with low-grade content farms. Second, a smaller set of exceptionally polished ones that feel unique and really want me to interview the candidate. These candidates will then utterly bomb in the interview, to the point where I'm often asking myself whose CV it was they had submitted.
>Anecdotally, I think a fair chunk of writing CVs (and to a smaller degree, cover letters) is already outsourced. Adding an AI to the mix will only make things worse.
This is why "I've submitted 1000 resumes in 3 weeks and can't get an interview!" posts on social media are rampant.
I'm guessing the real money linked in wants is in the hiring and firing, B2B. Now, every resume gets answered and your first interaction with a company is a poorly scripted AI who goes from manic enthusiasm to depressingly rote in the actual job requirements and probably will still ghost you and continue the imbalance of application effort vs employer response.
The converse will be true, but the price of AI will just make poor people have to suffer even more
Just the long march of wealth inequality and it's time sucking capitalism.
> the imbalance of application effort vs employer response.
A recent issue in the job application realm is AI application bots that will apply to 100's of jobs on your behalf, which is the opposite problem. Seems like both sides are racing to make applications as useless as possible as quickly as possible.
If you don't have a network, good luck in the future.
We're heading for the 1990's vision of agents negotiating on our behalf, except less exchange of reliable data and more attempts at bullshitting each other.
I don’t know why you’re downvoted here, it’s pretty well known there’s a huge bunch of people trying to pick up using LinkedIn DM’s, for whatever reason.
I think they've "fixed" (read: hidden) this better, but it used to be the case that if you looked at the LinkedIn profile of an above average attractive woman, the sidebar used to show profiles people had also looked at and it would invariably almost only profiles of other women with above average attractive profile pictures. While needless to say it was a lot more varied for men. It was just very blatantly showcasing that a lot of people were looking at profiles for reasons that were not so professional. Now the sidebar is a mix of other features, and I wonder if that was because it was easier to do that than "clean up" the profile views.
Yesterday I was walking to an interview. There was a starving dog on the road. I stopped to feed him & missed the interview. The next day I got a call asking to come in to do the interview. I was surprised, but I went. Then the interviewer came in. He was the dog.
An LLM trained on LinkedIn posts would be good for comedic purposes if nothing else. It's unintentional comedy score would be extremely high. Would love to see a conversation between an LLM trained on LinkedIn posts and an LLM trained on X/Twitter posts.
It’d be like a high-school argument between the edgy kid, and the kid that would wear suits and bring a briefcase. Comical, pointless and everyone else wants both of them to be quiet after about 10 minutes.
LinkedIn strikes me as the adult equivalent of self conscious school kids trying to hold a conversation among themselves, each self consciously trying to sound cool.
Vedal987 should work with LinkedIn to get access to this data, fine-tune Evil Neuro on LinkedIn posts, then have her read through business school case studies and offer advice.
It would be content so unhinged, it would remove the need for management consulting as an industry - companies could simply type their problems in chat and do the exact opposite of what Evil LinkedIn Neuro suggests!
Personally, I think it will offer valuable new insight on KPIs and challenges on conventional wisdom, because we certainly need more of that. Maybe throw in some gushing over how great a seminar was or a heart-warming story that renews my faith in capitalism.
God, I hope the poor thing never achieves consciousness. It will be like the butter-passing robot from Rick & Morty.
When you said this somehow I thought of training an art ai on the giant state sponsored monuments of the world.
On linkedin your next resume will have the impact of mount rushmore, sitting lincoln or a soviet era workers monument. (The thinker will be censored out because of nudity) :)
What if he overcomes the insecurities of the daily "founders don't take vacations" posters yet maintains their confidence and bravado? He will become unstoppable.
I am excited and humbled to announce that I recently received the opportunity to reply to CoastalCoder’s comment.
During this brilliant interaction I managed to learn a lot about improving my leadership capabilities, and teamwork.
If you are also looking to humbly increase your leadership potential, seek out #CoastalCoder #Mindfulness #Leadership or contact us for your #marketing needs
Or what you can learn about having your wife leave you for your ceo. Probably the one gem Instagram ever showed me in my feed. I couldn't believe that was real.
LinkedIn is an business card / CV storage site, where you can find a job.
If it was just a bunch of linked profiles with a job matching function, it would still be LinkedIn.
But of course, you can't work at a place that does something that mundane without suggesting something that makes you look like Facebook or Twitter. You have to at least give people some sort of reason to see what their old colleagues are up to.
Nobody really wants to read the LinkedIn feed, so it's perfectly acceptable that it gets flooded with AI generated content. In effect, the content on LinkedIn is that picture of a happy family on your insurance brochure. You can't not have a photo of something on that kind of marketing document, and you can't be a social network without some sort of doom-scrollable content.
This is just a cheap way to generate some wallpaper.
It is a shame. Twitter used to be quite a popular platform for (useful and interesting) networking in academia, but after it began to fall apart everyone started looking for alternatives. I felt that LinkedIn should be a decent alternative as it could strike that balance between professional and personal content, but there is just no way for a genuine community to develop on LinkenIn in its current form.
Even now LinkedIn is possibly the worst platform for being polluted with "AI slop", I cannot understand why they are looking to advance this further. Hell, when you go to write a post now there is a big flashing button saying "USE AI TO WRITE THIS POST"...?!?!
As boomers, gen X and millennials took over Facebook, gen Z took over LinkedIn:
“Networking as a concept was highly intimidating to me, until I reframed it in my mind as ‘making friends’ instead of the traditional meaning which made me feel like I was using people as stepping stones.”
It really make me think. If LI was just business profile, jobs board, and chat with recruiters, how much engineering would they need? I’m not saying to go Twitter mode and fire everybody, but certainly much less than now. So for that extra revenue from the feed, a lot of it will be eaten up by salaries for extra engineers. All of the extra work is going towards something largely viewed as useless.
Zooming out, I bet a lot of the economy is like this. In LI’s case literally some of the smartest people, people with PhDs who were maybe even born in another country, thinking for 40 hours a week about how to rank one piece of meaningless drivel above another one. This is instead of solving real, tangible problems that everyone can see. Ok maybe those people will pay taxes and end up contributing to something like education because they have to, but it’s a pretty inefficient way of making the world better.
LinkedIn also have tools for recruiters and sales folks to find people. I believe this is where a big part of their revenues come from (they are paid tools). Although, again I cannot imagine it being that complicated.
Well I got invited to Twitter HQ back when it was still called that. It was some obscure team offering an app library of some sort, IIRC. It certainly wasn't something close to the main product.
I suspect there are a lot of these sorts of investments in the big players, a bunch of teams doing far-from-core things that someone thought was worthwhile.
And you should consider that it's probably junk. From the article:
A 2021 study empirically tested several of Graeber's claims, such as that bullshit jobs were increasing over time and that they accounted for much of the workforce. Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful.
Many jobs that appear bad are actually needed, often only because of regulatory requirements or because their importance is misunderstood.
In my opinion, in today's world most jobs (at least office jobs) are "movers". They take something from point A to point B.
Often you'll have a chain of movers A - Z. Each link can almost be it's own company depending on the industry. Naturally each thinks they're important, because someone has to move it around. Of course, you could go from A straight to Z and eliminate 25 companies.
Point is many, maybe most, companies don't actually produce direct value. They facilitate and they move. Now that's much harder to analyze.
I wouldn't tell my boss or my colleagues the job I do is useless for hopefully obvious reasons, but when I really think about it in the grand scheme of things it really is a Bullshit Job. Basically any SaaS is (with some exceptions of course) just a collection of Bullshit Jobs.
But there's also nothing really wrong with that. We live in the society we live in, which basically necessitates the existence of many Bullshit Jobs in order for things to keep working as they do. I'd even argue basically anything that isn't to do with Healthcare, Education or similar things along those lines count as bullshit jobs really.
>study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful.
These people are self-reporting this. Quite frankly with the number of people in bullshit jobs who think they're doing work I wouldn't really put a lot of value in those types of self-reports.
I should read this. I really struggle with doing work which falls into this category. It’s bad for me, and even worse it strikes me as seriously problematic to society. I don’t want to earn money for nothing, even if most people involved feel as though that in itself is worthwhile. It has been a fairly significant factor in any struggle I’ve had finding work. I have to ask myself, is this a bullshit job? The answer is often yes.
I’ve recently remedied this to a degree by lowering salary expectations and looking in fields with a more scientific and practical basis in the products and outputs. Unfortunately I’m not a scientist, only a programmer, so my utility is seriously limited and finding work is quite a bit harder than if I were to stick within the SV startup scene.
While I don't disagree with the notion of the existence of BS jobs, UBI is not needed. Instead we need more companies to take on more and more interesting and world-solving things.
We keep saying we need UBI but at the same time "we don't have enough homes". Then instead of UBI, maybe people should "make homes"? (That's just one example - there are also jobs in food, healthcare, mental illness care, spacecraft, etc...
I mean, not nobody. I follow a lot of people that post very thoughtful things that spark discussion, and it's one of the only places I know of other than here where I can discuss topics related to my career or field with peers, and for me that's useful.
I really wish LinkedIn had features to filter out all the garbage from the feed. 90% is someome I know liking garbage that was posted by someone I neither know nor care about.
LinkedIn was changed over the years to promote users who write on the platform.
Not just about viewership - if you are applying to positions, LinkedIn gives preference to candidates who are more engaged ON the network (posts, likes, comments, Pulse) over lurkers. [1]
So this is only getting worse. You'll have to see a lower quality feed just because the algorithm is forcing everyone to boost their own metrics anyway.
Lol, why is this getting downvoted? You want empirical evidence? You think this is made up? I’ve literally gotten contracts based on discussions I’ve had on my linkedin feed. Maybe your feed sucks or you have nothing interesting to say. It is far easier to curate a linkedin feed than ANY other social media app out there.
That’s a fair point. I don’t care about karma either but try to use it as a signal as to whether I’m making good contributions to the site or not, which is usually fairly reliable. Maybe I should have included a list of my favorite follows, had considered that, but it’d probably out me more than I’d like.
Little point. It'll be like facebook's opt-out and only cover things you post/update going forward. Everything you've already posted has already been slurped into the training set and won't be taken out and the model(s) retrained.
The only way to show disapproval in this sort of behaviour that they'll feel is to stop using services that use auto-opt-in for anything, and not enough people are likely to do that for it to be effective.
I am currently covered by GDPR and such, though that is something that could easily change (I'm a UKian so no longer an EUian).
But that isn't enforced with the teeth it really needs, and I really don't trust that companies like LinkedIn will do the right thing, nor the legally required thing where they differ, given how much effort it could be and the likelihood of anything being done about it if they don't and this isn't obviously detected (or a whistleblower speaks out). So my choice is to walkaway from the service (or never use it in the first place) or just accept that my stuff will get used that way.
That, and given it is public information that we've already agreed to let LinkedIn use however the hell it likes via signup and “by continuing to use this service”¹, so there would be the whole “is it even a privacy issue?” argument² to have before getting to that nitty-gritty.
----
[1] again, maybe there are legal routes to stop that, though I don't know about you but I certainly can't afford the time or legal resources to investigate further
[2] I'm assuming “right to be forgotten” doesn't apply in this case, as we are talking about a particular use of the information not wanting the complete removal of it from all their services.
The opt-out option doesn't exist in my setting. So it seems like they are targeting areas outside of the EU for this slurping, at least on the surface.
Since I can never prove whether my data was included in the AI or not... they could slurp it regardless and claim ignorance until some internal whistleblower brings it to light.
IANAL so only guessing here, and not even particularly educated guessing, but I suspect the LLM trainers' legal team will use the same set of defences/excuses/ignorance-because-their-client-can-afford-the-legal-fees-going-forward-and-the-other-side-can't that are being used against cases based on copyright & licensing issues.
I would suggest that if LinkedIn is training their AI models on user data and content, users should get a copy of the said model free of charge.
That or LinkedIn should at least be compelled to ask explicit permission for model training. None of this Darth Vader stuff where they "altered the deal".
In their TOS they probably give themselves the right to do whatever the hell they want with the stuff you post there. If you store your data on someone else's computer, it's not yours any more, no matter how personal it is.
The best summary of the situation I've seen is: these corporations do not understand (or ignore) the concept of consent (and reciprocity).
And also that the concept of rights hasn't quite arrived in the digital sphere yet.
Humanity better keep an eye on the owners and managers responsible for these decisions, and hold them to account for their selfishness, deceptiveness, theft, coercion and greed
Not only content, but, more importantly, also "personal data".
> When this setting is on LinkedIn and its affiliates may use your personal data and content you create on LinkedIn for that purpose.
I'm guessing that "personal data" means they're making models that (are one way) AI-based systems will have access to the huge database of personal information entrusted to LinkedIn.
And even contemporary LLMs make this much more accessible, for more casual use, by more people.
Presumably this sharing of data for training is already happening, and (of course) the new "preference" defaulted to ON, even for people who'd previously opted-out of related privacy settings (e.g., "Profile visibility outside LinkedIn" was OFF).
A ton of LinkedIn users are private individuals (not public figures). They're only on LinkedIn because they want continued employment, that's where the recruiters are, and many employers and other opportunities (including YC?) require LinkedIn profiles.
Given LinkedIn's dominant role, with many citizens required to use LinkedIn for something as basic as employment, and meaning people have to share personal information with LinkedIn, maybe it's time for US regulators to set rules on how that information may be used and shared by LinkedIn.
This tells me that the page does not exist (apparently because I'm in a GDPR region that doesn't allow this behavior from LinkedIn, I understand now from reading this thread).
It really pisses me off that privacy services (and push notification) are enabled by default. I’ve gone in and disabled virtually everything, it’s reasonable to deduce I value my privacy enough to do that, then I probably don’t want new enabled-by-default things in that category.
I’m curious if LI has scraped data before giving people the opportunity to disable the feature.
I met one of the PMs building this. She was working on NL unified search for the feed. I noticed it’s gotten way better in the last few weeks. Instead of using Google to search [first name][last name][“linkedin”], now i can reliably type my query into LinkedIn’s search bar and get the correct result. I’m a fan.
Search by name has worked well on LinkedIn since forever. If the person I'm looking for has an account then they're almost always in the first page of search results.
Hi LinkedIn AI, please write some python code for a quick sort.
LinkedIn AI: I am proud and humbled to be promoted to the level of senior qsort code writer, and wish to thank my amazing colleagues at LinkedIn HQ for their tremendous support over the last 18 months. It is with great regret that I have moved on from writing bubble sorts. Please click this link to apply to see an industry analysis of quick sort code.
I missed this somehow on the HN front page yesterday, but this morning (US Eastern) it went from front page to buried before California wakes up.
> 136. LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool (twitter.com/racheltobac) 387 points by lopkeny12ko 17 hours ago | unvote | flag | hide | 221 comments
This is so weird, how is this legal? No other type of company just tacks on stuff to agreements and contracts and says “you want this” so how come US tech companies are always getting away with it?
It also only applies going forward, so the default opt-in means they've already taken what they want before we get a chance to say no. Though to be fair I never expected otherwise.
If you don't want them to train models with the data you give them, don't give them data. They should be able to train whatever they want with it without regulation and there's no reason to request permission.
I also deleted about 1-2 years ago. I’ve been wondering if I will regret it next time I am looking for work. Have you been in that position yet? I am seeking validation that I didn’t screw my future self over lol. Despite how truly awful the platform is, it’s still ubiquitous…
Can’t help but wonder how much of what’s posted to LinkedIn today is already the output of an LLM. So their AI tool will, in the limit, be trained on the output of other AI tools…
What do you use premium for? Apart from linkedin learning, I found no valid use. I was getting fake messages which are literally just ads even when I had premium.
For me it's because when I was actively looking for a role without Premium, LI started to block me from viewing people's profiles half way through each month, saying I was looking at too many profiles a month for the free tier, so I had to get premium to keep reading.
I had no idea; I didn't think I was reading many and I wasn't doing it systematically, just being curious.
After getting Premium, I could see who viewed my profile and how many views over time, which I felt was useful. It tells me about personalised top jobs, and it sometimes comes up with things I wouldn't have searched for that do seem interesting. Nothing ever came of those as jobs, but I've learned about companies doing interesting things which overlap my skillset as a result.
There's also the ability to send more messages a month to people I'm not connected with, but I write so rarely that's never been an issue.
I'm still on Premium by choice, but I still get the fake message ads, spammer connection requests and promoted ad posts.
In the end, my last 3 jobs were obtained via LinkedIn, the current one was via a LinkedIn social post which caused me to write to the poster, and a field I work in now (zero-knowledge proofs) is because of a conference someone talked about on LinkedIn. Many plausibly good contracts are advertised only as LI social posts, not even as LI jobs. So it's undoubtedly valuable to me for work, and valuable to have parasocial connections on it (to see those posts), even if it is a strange mixture of fake platitudes and real but self-interested posts.
Can confirm, I am from the EU (PL) and don't see such option.
But I saw one that mentions passing data to third parties for "social, economic, and workplace research" and I took the opportunity to switch that off.
Me too, but I wonder if it's actually a GDPR perk or maybe some regional A/B kind of thing. Or whatever. I mean, I am not sure if it's a good news or a bad news.
Social media websites could use AI to simply generate posts. I mean, why not? User engagement is all that counts, it doesn't matter by what means and at what moral costs, right?
I don't mean fake users (although I wouldn't put corporate greed beyond trying to fake users). It could be sold as a helpful feature, like summaries of workplace happenings, news, world events, or discussions on the platform in the feeds. Of course, they would need to be filtered for ethical alignment with the social media company, as well as community safety, naturally... Certain political opinions may be less safe than others, and so on...
> Social media websites could use AI to simply generate posts. I mean, why not? User engagement is all that counts, it doesn't matter by what means and at what moral costs, right?
It is already happening with engagement farming users, so a platform doing it to make itself look more active is not a stretch at all. Reddit did that sort of astroturfing the old fashioned way back when it was starting up, so there is at least one well documented precedent already.
Reddit founders created alts and posted with them to give the impression of a thriving community back in the beginning. Now that could all be automated. Bluesky will probably be the last "authentic" social media site, and even then, it's initial gain was from name recognition of the people starting it. From now on out ask yourself if you are joining a real community or something astroturfed.
Posting AI image spam to facebook, and producing tutorials about it are both tidy little cottage industries now. It is so voluminous and predictable that it's hard to believe facebook are not quietly giving it a pass as an arm's-length experiment on automated content.
There will never be a technological solution to such problems. The only way to fight company's greed is regulation through strong legislation. Thanks to the GDPR, in the EU (extended to the European economic area) and in Switzerland, LinkedIn can't use their users personal data to train their AI. It is made clear in there FAQ [1]:
> Note that we do not currently train content-generating AI models from members located in the EU, EEA, or Switzerland.
Anyway, the best move is still to just get out of this platform [2]. LinkedIn has a history full of dark patterns and really bad behaviors concerning personal data. At some point they even impersonated their users by mailing their contacts (sometimes shadily scrapped) in their name without the impersonated user consent or knowledge.
Dear LinkedIn, i don't care about your new shiny AI. Fix your primary features first, like the jobs tab doesn't show anything for me in any company, your job search is amateur (I could have implemented it better) and website and application are always laggy and overheating my iPhone or m1 after a couple minutes.
You know for once, I'm not even that mad about something like this. Mostly because I literally never do anything on LinkedIn other than once in a month check my messages there.
I'd love to see the slew of AI-generated garbage, since it'll be completely indistinguishable from regular LI "content"!
Again, why is there an expectation for a company to do X and not Y with data you give them for free? They can do pretty much anything they want including not securing it. As nearly every single US company does.
I am surprised that people are suprised by this. I assume that any social or professional network is using my data for training and selling ads. And I share things accordingly.
I'm EU based, I don't see this option under my settings. Maybe it is currently tested only on US entities or hopefully our legal framework about privacy prevents such disgraceful practices
speaking from my own experiences, linkedin does not seem to have any more introspective text content than, say, facebook.
from the commercial/influencer side, many have taken the AI route already by using LLMs to help write or spice up their posts. even for paid users, the site allows to help you write your bio or certain types of pieces for the past few quarters.
maybe the posts of the yesteryear and like the comments section seems like a "valuable" source for them really. although it would be a bit more scary if this is for video and photos too, although besides the headshots it has also been a lot of AI content in the tech space lately.
Looking forward to the AI that is just really excited to tell you it has a new IT certification or promotion from mediocre middle-manager position X to mediocre middle manager position Y.
> LinkedIn seems to have auto enrolled folks in the US, but hearing from folks in the EU that they are not seeing this listed in their settings (likely due to privacy regulations).
Honestly, GDPR looks like a godsend! It came just at the right time!
all linkedin content already now feels ai-generated. the transformer being b & c players regurgitating other people's motivational stories and "humbled" announcement posts and of course with a selfie attached to it for no reason other than the algorithm
Yes, finally a ThoughtLeaderAI. Will Turing test be able to differentiate between current CVs of LinkedIn users and the one to be generated by ThoughtLeaderAI.
Someone filled in https://www.linkedin.com/not-applicable today on their job app, and I have to admit, that was clever. I don't personally like that we make that field required.
That's not a thing a contemporary LLM can do. At best it will be able to know which buzzwords are popular, which will then immediately deteriorate their usefulness once everybody starts generating AI-optimized noise for their LinkedIn profiles.
Y'all will never convince me that the majority of content on LinkedIn hasn't been machine generated for years now. Some of the SEO-optimised corporate-speak drivel on there makes ChatGPT look like Shakespeare.
I mean, if all of the linkedin "content" was generated by an AI, no one would really notice, and it will be. It's just an online CV / proposal / interview booking website, the rest is just some funny guy attempt to make it look like facebook. It's actually strange to me that they did not attempt to copy instagram stories, tinder swipe-cards or any of those once popular clubhouse audio rooms, maybe they want all of them still....
This is your kindly reminder that if you're not the customer, then you are the product, with an added caveat that, when it comes to social networks, you are always the product.
I say that as a happy product, uhh, user of every social network out there.
Prepare to be flooded with trite aphorisms, vacuous top-10 lists, queeze-inducing personal announcements and 'acceptance' speeches, and other toxic positivity.
Somehow i feel sad for this AI model. All the others are trained on authentic content and this boy gets socialised on the most shallow content imaginable. Poor, socially awkward AI.
Why on earth would you train AI on that? In the social media world it's already the closest thing resembling boring, unreadable machine generated content.
No matter what you ask it, it'll brag about what a great job it's doing answering you, announce that it's having a baby, then tell everybody that it's being let go because there are better AI. It'll thank a few key people who it worked with, and tell you that it's actually thrilled with this opportunity to take a break from answering your question, and will spend more time on its old hobby of being an online resume.
Because there is a huge market for resume builders and career guidance where AI can play a role. Using LinkedIn you can measure success and network performance and correlate that to the resume and posted content.
There's also real money in writing LinkedIn content that is believable enough for "influencers" to post. I'm currently contracting, and post on LinkedIn at least once a day, and I've added ~1k+ followers in the last month, but it takes effort. Meanwhile, those posts have gotten me work, and so if it was feasible for me to outsource it in a reputationally safe way, I'd consider it.
For me the bar for "reputationally safe" is really high because my market (cynical tech CTO's etc. don't respond well to things that sounds like ChatGPT) and so I don't expect to any time soon, but for many others that bar is pretty low as long as it's good enough for LinkedIn's algorithm to give it impressions.
>I'm currently contracting, and post on LinkedIn at least once a day, and I've added ~1k+ followers in the last month, but it takes effort. Meanwhile, those posts have gotten me work, and so if it was feasible for me to outsource it in a reputationally safe way, I'd consider it.
If you need to pay the bills and this helps, good for you.
But boy howdy does this sound terrible. It's amazing to me that there are people out there who take anything on LinkedIn seriously. I mean, it's not like the posts are inherently bad, but the entire point of the site is to "influence" and sell to each other. It's horrible. If I were looking for talent, it'd probably be the last site I'd use.
Are you ok to accept that you're probably an outlier?
Because while I have kind of the same opinion as you, I also know lots of (good and generally smart) people who say they learn a ton of useful work-related stuff from reading LinkedIn posts.
Not everyone is at the same point in their career, or has the same level of knowledge and confidence in their craft or job position. For some folks, reading thoughts and writings from more senior people can actually be beneficial..
And yes there's a lot of platitudes and BS on LinkedIn, but some people do put real effort into sharing actually useful information as well.
> people who say they learn a ton of useful work-related stuff from reading LinkedIn posts
I suspect this says more about what the reader doesn't know and their mastery of info self-exposure than it says about the contentfulness of LinkedIn posts*.
* Not counting content originating elsewhere re-posted on or linked to from LinkedIn.
So all LinkedIn posts are of the same quality then? Would you also say that all HN comments are of the same quality too? You're painting with an awfully big brush.
Look I get it, there's a lot of crap on LinkedIn for sure, and it's pretty obvious this crowd is generally against "influencers".. I also see no value in them generally speaking.
But it's reductive, and inaccurate, to say that there's zero value across the board on there and that every post is low-value influencer-spam. Not everyone is trying to build an audience or push their newsletter.
Some people just want to share their knowledge and interact with their professional peers, and for better or worse LinkedIn is the most known place to do that..
You could say the same thing about this place. Why are we all here?
> You could say the same thing about this place. Why are we all here?
Not to preen or self-promote or "network". Most here are anonymous.
Both of us use names, and you have the meethn and I have a "we are hiring" ... Still, I don't think either of us is here just to meet people or just to hire. My profile has only said that for a couple of the more than a decade I've been here.
I hope you realize that if everyone can do "computational influencing", everyone will.
A Nash Equilibrium of automated bullshit, it'll just make everything more miserable, programmatically.
I think if you read LinkedIn posts you get what you deserve
I don't think anybody said influencers don't put effort in it. The only argument is that the added value by influencers is zero, be it on Instagram or LinkedIn, so if AI can take that kind of job the net loss is also zero. Of course of course there's an audience for influencers, like there was an audience at Tupperware shows, but they'll be happy to move on to the next fad so again zero loss.
Once again, AI will automate checkboxing tasks—-things that some people think some other people value so it has to be done even though basically no on values it so no one wants to do the soulless task.
:insert Christoph Waltz meme: You're sheltering LinkedIn slop, are you not?
Anecdotally, I think a fair chunk of writing CVs (and to a smaller degree, cover letters) is already outsourced. Adding an AI to the mix will only make things worse.
I have seen a number of CVs over the past few months that fall into two eye-rolling categories. First, those that have the same set of skills in the exact same order, and routinely sport identical expressions. Over time I've come to associate them with low-grade content farms. Second, a smaller set of exceptionally polished ones that feel unique and really want me to interview the candidate. These candidates will then utterly bomb in the interview, to the point where I'm often asking myself whose CV it was they had submitted.
Signal-to-noise ratio is tending towards zero.
>Anecdotally, I think a fair chunk of writing CVs (and to a smaller degree, cover letters) is already outsourced. Adding an AI to the mix will only make things worse.
This is why "I've submitted 1000 resumes in 3 weeks and can't get an interview!" posts on social media are rampant.
I was going to say that it's the streetlight effect but this makes even more sense.
LinkedIn, like GitHub and (to a degree) OpenAI are under Microsoft’s umbrella.
I'm guessing the real money linked in wants is in the hiring and firing, B2B. Now, every resume gets answered and your first interaction with a company is a poorly scripted AI who goes from manic enthusiasm to depressingly rote in the actual job requirements and probably will still ghost you and continue the imbalance of application effort vs employer response.
The converse will be true, but the price of AI will just make poor people have to suffer even more
Just the long march of wealth inequality and it's time sucking capitalism.
This seems to imply that machines would ghost humans to save on token fees. I wouldn't rule it out.
> the imbalance of application effort vs employer response.
A recent issue in the job application realm is AI application bots that will apply to 100's of jobs on your behalf, which is the opposite problem. Seems like both sides are racing to make applications as useless as possible as quickly as possible.
If you don't have a network, good luck in the future.
We're heading for the 1990's vision of agents negotiating on our behalf, except less exchange of reliable data and more attempts at bullshitting each other.
Can't wait 'til it gets raunchy in everybody's DMs unprompted, just like the training data...
I don’t know why you’re downvoted here, it’s pretty well known there’s a huge bunch of people trying to pick up using LinkedIn DM’s, for whatever reason.
I think they've "fixed" (read: hidden) this better, but it used to be the case that if you looked at the LinkedIn profile of an above average attractive woman, the sidebar used to show profiles people had also looked at and it would invariably almost only profiles of other women with above average attractive profile pictures. While needless to say it was a lot more varied for men. It was just very blatantly showcasing that a lot of people were looking at profiles for reasons that were not so professional. Now the sidebar is a mix of other features, and I wonder if that was because it was easier to do that than "clean up" the profile views.
Wouldn’t you want an ai to talk to recruiters for you?
So you can make more boring, unreadable machine generated content.
That made me laugh. Thank you.
A HR AI would be useful
I mean, write me a shitpost isn’t an empty customer set.
Yesterday I was walking to an interview. There was a starving dog on the road. I stopped to feed him & missed the interview. The next day I got a call asking to come in to do the interview. I was surprised, but I went. Then the interviewer came in. He was the dog.
Agree?
one of many posts on LinkedIn.
Got to love furry-owned companies for tech jobs :)
An LLM trained on LinkedIn posts would be good for comedic purposes if nothing else. It's unintentional comedy score would be extremely high. Would love to see a conversation between an LLM trained on LinkedIn posts and an LLM trained on X/Twitter posts.
It’d be like a high-school argument between the edgy kid, and the kid that would wear suits and bring a briefcase. Comical, pointless and everyone else wants both of them to be quiet after about 10 minutes.
The Corporate Memphis of AI models.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
LinkedIn strikes me as the adult equivalent of self conscious school kids trying to hold a conversation among themselves, each self consciously trying to sound cool.
School kids would seem less disingenuous about their virtue signalling though.
Are you kidding? If any model ever makes the x-risk folks' nightmares come true, it'll be this one.
Vedal987 should work with LinkedIn to get access to this data, fine-tune Evil Neuro on LinkedIn posts, then have her read through business school case studies and offer advice.
It would be content so unhinged, it would remove the need for management consulting as an industry - companies could simply type their problems in chat and do the exact opposite of what Evil LinkedIn Neuro suggests!
(for the uninitiated: https://www.youtube.com/@Neurosama & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-sama)
I, for one, am humbled that LinkedIn AI has selected my content to model further engagement with other stakeholders.
I learned this while considering watching a video from MIT. Accordingly, I’m adding “AI Training Coordinator — MIT Inspired” to my skills.
Personally, I think it will offer valuable new insight on KPIs and challenges on conventional wisdom, because we certainly need more of that. Maybe throw in some gushing over how great a seminar was or a heart-warming story that renews my faith in capitalism.
God, I hope the poor thing never achieves consciousness. It will be like the butter-passing robot from Rick & Morty.
When you said this somehow I thought of training an art ai on the giant state sponsored monuments of the world.
On linkedin your next resume will have the impact of mount rushmore, sitting lincoln or a soviet era workers monument. (The thinker will be censored out because of nudity) :)
The /r/LinkedInLunatics/ subreddit is going to get swamped with all the new content this monster generates.
This AI’s vocabulary is going to be the greatest thing on the internet in a long time. I can’t wait! :)
It's the AI where 996 or 80 work weeks are the norm.
> Somehow i feel sad for this AI model.
it will be the first AI CEO.
What if he overcomes the insecurities of the daily "founders don't take vacations" posters yet maintains their confidence and bravado? He will become unstoppable.
Still better than training on the Reddit data.
Mmmm authentic doesn't mean good or positive or rational.
So, what were you trying to say?
AI is about to learn what a tragic car accident can teach them about leadership and drop shipping.
Hilarious. They'll soon discover the need for a preprompt "You are not humbled and honored"
I can't wait to read more stories like that. Inspirational.
I'm humbled to be so awesome at appreciating your comment.
I am excited and humbled to announce that I recently received the opportunity to reply to CoastalCoder’s comment.
During this brilliant interaction I managed to learn a lot about improving my leadership capabilities, and teamwork.
If you are also looking to humbly increase your leadership potential, seek out #CoastalCoder #Mindfulness #Leadership or contact us for your #marketing needs
Did the LinkedIn bot get loose early? I thought I was on LinkedIn for a second ...
some of you are really good at this LI game... /j
This comment is going to be heavily downvoted, and it will be a tremendously discouraging phase of my life.
But read on for what it taught me about B2B marketing.
Agree?
Or what you can learn about having your wife leave you for your ceo. Probably the one gem Instagram ever showed me in my feed. I couldn't believe that was real.
I never lose. I either win or I learn.
LinkedIn is an business card / CV storage site, where you can find a job.
If it was just a bunch of linked profiles with a job matching function, it would still be LinkedIn.
But of course, you can't work at a place that does something that mundane without suggesting something that makes you look like Facebook or Twitter. You have to at least give people some sort of reason to see what their old colleagues are up to.
Nobody really wants to read the LinkedIn feed, so it's perfectly acceptable that it gets flooded with AI generated content. In effect, the content on LinkedIn is that picture of a happy family on your insurance brochure. You can't not have a photo of something on that kind of marketing document, and you can't be a social network without some sort of doom-scrollable content.
This is just a cheap way to generate some wallpaper.
It is a shame. Twitter used to be quite a popular platform for (useful and interesting) networking in academia, but after it began to fall apart everyone started looking for alternatives. I felt that LinkedIn should be a decent alternative as it could strike that balance between professional and personal content, but there is just no way for a genuine community to develop on LinkenIn in its current form.
Even now LinkedIn is possibly the worst platform for being polluted with "AI slop", I cannot understand why they are looking to advance this further. Hell, when you go to write a post now there is a big flashing button saying "USE AI TO WRITE THIS POST"...?!?!
LinkedIn has turned into Facebook before it became irrelevant - people sharing their irrelevant life episodes and baby pictures.
As boomers, gen X and millennials took over Facebook, gen Z took over LinkedIn:
“Networking as a concept was highly intimidating to me, until I reframed it in my mind as ‘making friends’ instead of the traditional meaning which made me feel like I was using people as stepping stones.”
https://www.nysscpa.org/article-content/gen-z--now-networks-...
I agree this is how I (an engineer) use it too. But I suggest you talk to some more business people. They live on LinkedIn.
You've succinctly described how business people are part of the problem, not the solution.
If you’re not part of the primary user base, how would you know the problem?
Their culture and personality is the problem. I think there are very few people on earth that have never met one of these people.
It really make me think. If LI was just business profile, jobs board, and chat with recruiters, how much engineering would they need? I’m not saying to go Twitter mode and fire everybody, but certainly much less than now. So for that extra revenue from the feed, a lot of it will be eaten up by salaries for extra engineers. All of the extra work is going towards something largely viewed as useless.
Zooming out, I bet a lot of the economy is like this. In LI’s case literally some of the smartest people, people with PhDs who were maybe even born in another country, thinking for 40 hours a week about how to rank one piece of meaningless drivel above another one. This is instead of solving real, tangible problems that everyone can see. Ok maybe those people will pay taxes and end up contributing to something like education because they have to, but it’s a pretty inefficient way of making the world better.
LinkedIn also have tools for recruiters and sales folks to find people. I believe this is where a big part of their revenues come from (they are paid tools). Although, again I cannot imagine it being that complicated.
Well I got invited to Twitter HQ back when it was still called that. It was some obscure team offering an app library of some sort, IIRC. It certainly wasn't something close to the main product.
I suspect there are a lot of these sorts of investments in the big players, a bunch of teams doing far-from-core things that someone thought was worthwhile.
You should check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
And you should consider that it's probably junk. From the article:
Many jobs that appear bad are actually needed, often only because of regulatory requirements or because their importance is misunderstood.In my opinion, in today's world most jobs (at least office jobs) are "movers". They take something from point A to point B.
Often you'll have a chain of movers A - Z. Each link can almost be it's own company depending on the industry. Naturally each thinks they're important, because someone has to move it around. Of course, you could go from A straight to Z and eliminate 25 companies.
Point is many, maybe most, companies don't actually produce direct value. They facilitate and they move. Now that's much harder to analyze.
These are self-reported, though.
I wouldn't tell my boss or my colleagues the job I do is useless for hopefully obvious reasons, but when I really think about it in the grand scheme of things it really is a Bullshit Job. Basically any SaaS is (with some exceptions of course) just a collection of Bullshit Jobs.
But there's also nothing really wrong with that. We live in the society we live in, which basically necessitates the existence of many Bullshit Jobs in order for things to keep working as they do. I'd even argue basically anything that isn't to do with Healthcare, Education or similar things along those lines count as bullshit jobs really.
>study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful.
These people are self-reporting this. Quite frankly with the number of people in bullshit jobs who think they're doing work I wouldn't really put a lot of value in those types of self-reports.
"I Have People Skills! I Am Good At Dealing With People!"
>And you should consider that it's probably junk. From the article
It's "probably junk" because some random EU survey in 2021 said so?
>often only because of regulatory requirements
Textbook "bullshit job" (that doesn't exist, of course).
Spoken like one of the six managers every single person needs to have.
Not commenting specifically on LI ranking, but Byrne Hobart wrote a terrific rebuttal of the main premise of this book https://www.thediff.co/archive/bullshit-jobs-is-a-terrible-c...
I should read this. I really struggle with doing work which falls into this category. It’s bad for me, and even worse it strikes me as seriously problematic to society. I don’t want to earn money for nothing, even if most people involved feel as though that in itself is worthwhile. It has been a fairly significant factor in any struggle I’ve had finding work. I have to ask myself, is this a bullshit job? The answer is often yes.
I’ve recently remedied this to a degree by lowering salary expectations and looking in fields with a more scientific and practical basis in the products and outputs. Unfortunately I’m not a scientist, only a programmer, so my utility is seriously limited and finding work is quite a bit harder than if I were to stick within the SV startup scene.
While I don't disagree with the notion of the existence of BS jobs, UBI is not needed. Instead we need more companies to take on more and more interesting and world-solving things.
We keep saying we need UBI but at the same time "we don't have enough homes". Then instead of UBI, maybe people should "make homes"? (That's just one example - there are also jobs in food, healthcare, mental illness care, spacecraft, etc...
>Nobody really wants to read the LinkedIn feed,
I mean, not nobody. I follow a lot of people that post very thoughtful things that spark discussion, and it's one of the only places I know of other than here where I can discuss topics related to my career or field with peers, and for me that's useful.
I really wish LinkedIn had features to filter out all the garbage from the feed. 90% is someome I know liking garbage that was posted by someone I neither know nor care about.
LinkedIn was changed over the years to promote users who write on the platform.
Not just about viewership - if you are applying to positions, LinkedIn gives preference to candidates who are more engaged ON the network (posts, likes, comments, Pulse) over lurkers. [1]
So this is only getting worse. You'll have to see a lower quality feed just because the algorithm is forcing everyone to boost their own metrics anyway.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi - See your own tracking, look at the metrics description
Lol, why is this getting downvoted? You want empirical evidence? You think this is made up? I’ve literally gotten contracts based on discussions I’ve had on my linkedin feed. Maybe your feed sucks or you have nothing interesting to say. It is far easier to curate a linkedin feed than ANY other social media app out there.
I don’t care that much for karma, but I have a feeling every comment on this entire article is getting downvoted
That’s a fair point. I don’t care about karma either but try to use it as a signal as to whether I’m making good contributions to the site or not, which is usually fairly reliable. Maybe I should have included a list of my favorite follows, had considered that, but it’d probably out me more than I’d like.
Preferences to turn off
https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/m/settings/data-for-a...
https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/m/settings/policy-and...
Thank you for sharing these links. They both worked for me (in the US); both were set to ON when I got there, and I was able to turn both OFF.
For me, 1st link is 404 and 2nd one was already OFF by default. EU.
EU here, the 2nd one was on for me. I don't remember opting in to this.
Same here.
yup, I think this isn't activated within Europe.
> I recommend opting out now
Little point. It'll be like facebook's opt-out and only cover things you post/update going forward. Everything you've already posted has already been slurped into the training set and won't be taken out and the model(s) retrained.
The only way to show disapproval in this sort of behaviour that they'll feel is to stop using services that use auto-opt-in for anything, and not enough people are likely to do that for it to be effective.
Not if you live in Europe, thanks to strong privacy legislation.
I am currently covered by GDPR and such, though that is something that could easily change (I'm a UKian so no longer an EUian).
But that isn't enforced with the teeth it really needs, and I really don't trust that companies like LinkedIn will do the right thing, nor the legally required thing where they differ, given how much effort it could be and the likelihood of anything being done about it if they don't and this isn't obviously detected (or a whistleblower speaks out). So my choice is to walkaway from the service (or never use it in the first place) or just accept that my stuff will get used that way.
That, and given it is public information that we've already agreed to let LinkedIn use however the hell it likes via signup and “by continuing to use this service”¹, so there would be the whole “is it even a privacy issue?” argument² to have before getting to that nitty-gritty.
----
[1] again, maybe there are legal routes to stop that, though I don't know about you but I certainly can't afford the time or legal resources to investigate further
[2] I'm assuming “right to be forgotten” doesn't apply in this case, as we are talking about a particular use of the information not wanting the complete removal of it from all their services.
I wonder how this works if someone in a GDPR country got slurped up somehow. Could they demand the entire LLM be deleted?
A person from Sweden is here.
The opt-out option doesn't exist in my setting. So it seems like they are targeting areas outside of the EU for this slurping, at least on the surface.
Since I can never prove whether my data was included in the AI or not... they could slurp it regardless and claim ignorance until some internal whistleblower brings it to light.
IANAL so only guessing here, and not even particularly educated guessing, but I suspect the LLM trainers' legal team will use the same set of defences/excuses/ignorance-because-their-client-can-afford-the-legal-fees-going-forward-and-the-other-side-can't that are being used against cases based on copyright & licensing issues.
I would suggest that if LinkedIn is training their AI models on user data and content, users should get a copy of the said model free of charge.
That or LinkedIn should at least be compelled to ask explicit permission for model training. None of this Darth Vader stuff where they "altered the deal".
In their TOS they probably give themselves the right to do whatever the hell they want with the stuff you post there. If you store your data on someone else's computer, it's not yours any more, no matter how personal it is.
TOS do not, in practice, constitute informed consent, especially if they are silently changed, without a human readable summary and an explicit opt-in
Agreed, but as long as you can't successfully sue them for doing it anyway, the point is moot.
Also, if you already “agreed” to TOS that lets them do whatever they want, they don't need to change it.
The best summary of the situation I've seen is: these corporations do not understand (or ignore) the concept of consent (and reciprocity).
And also that the concept of rights hasn't quite arrived in the digital sphere yet.
Humanity better keep an eye on the owners and managers responsible for these decisions, and hold them to account for their selfishness, deceptiveness, theft, coercion and greed
Unfortunately, these businesses didn't get to the top by treating people ethically. Don't think they will start now.
Yeah, give me free stuff!
Not only content, but, more importantly, also "personal data".
> When this setting is on LinkedIn and its affiliates may use your personal data and content you create on LinkedIn for that purpose.
I'm guessing that "personal data" means they're making models that (are one way) AI-based systems will have access to the huge database of personal information entrusted to LinkedIn.
And even contemporary LLMs make this much more accessible, for more casual use, by more people.
Presumably this sharing of data for training is already happening, and (of course) the new "preference" defaulted to ON, even for people who'd previously opted-out of related privacy settings (e.g., "Profile visibility outside LinkedIn" was OFF).
A ton of LinkedIn users are private individuals (not public figures). They're only on LinkedIn because they want continued employment, that's where the recruiters are, and many employers and other opportunities (including YC?) require LinkedIn profiles.
Given LinkedIn's dominant role, with many citizens required to use LinkedIn for something as basic as employment, and meaning people have to share personal information with LinkedIn, maybe it's time for US regulators to set rules on how that information may be used and shared by LinkedIn.
I wouldn’t have ever thought that LinkedIn feed content was written by real people if I hadn’t met some of them in real life.
It’s a low enough bar that I think AI content will fit right in.
I can get to that setting (when logged in) at https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/settings/data-for-a...
This tells me that the page does not exist (apparently because I'm in a GDPR region that doesn't allow this behavior from LinkedIn, I understand now from reading this thread).
Same here. I live in a GDPR country.
I'm currently sitting in a GDPR region, though just visiting.
The setting is visible and settable for me (it was ON, now it's OFF)
Thanks!
Joke's on them because I use AI to generate LI content.
Joke's on them because my LinkedIn content is devoid of intelligence
Jokes on you because nobody else’s content is intelligent either.
Why is this downvoted.
Cause it’s not reddit here.
LinkedIn content only had a thin veneer of humanity before the onslaught of LLMs anyways.
Humanity is pushing it. There are some serious lunatics on there.
It really pisses me off that privacy services (and push notification) are enabled by default. I’ve gone in and disabled virtually everything, it’s reasonable to deduce I value my privacy enough to do that, then I probably don’t want new enabled-by-default things in that category.
I’m curious if LI has scraped data before giving people the opportunity to disable the feature.
I met one of the PMs building this. She was working on NL unified search for the feed. I noticed it’s gotten way better in the last few weeks. Instead of using Google to search [first name][last name][“linkedin”], now i can reliably type my query into LinkedIn’s search bar and get the correct result. I’m a fan.
Search by name has worked well on LinkedIn since forever. If the person I'm looking for has an account then they're almost always in the first page of search results.
Hi LinkedIn AI, please write some python code for a quick sort.
LinkedIn AI: I am proud and humbled to be promoted to the level of senior qsort code writer, and wish to thank my amazing colleagues at LinkedIn HQ for their tremendous support over the last 18 months. It is with great regret that I have moved on from writing bubble sorts. Please click this link to apply to see an industry analysis of quick sort code.
I missed this somehow on the HN front page yesterday, but this morning (US Eastern) it went from front page to buried before California wakes up.
> 136. LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool (twitter.com/racheltobac) 387 points by lopkeny12ko 17 hours ago | unvote | flag | hide | 221 comments
This is so weird, how is this legal? No other type of company just tacks on stuff to agreements and contracts and says “you want this” so how come US tech companies are always getting away with it?
Ironically, the same country in which corporations just won't shut up about "stifling regulations".
It's off in Europe. So this is about missing regulation in the US.
Ahhh I thought they'd just roll the dice and hope the EU wouldn't bother. That's wild, Americans are getting fucked over like this :-/
And me too in the UK.
It also only applies going forward, so the default opt-in means they've already taken what they want before we get a chance to say no. Though to be fair I never expected otherwise.
If your location is set to EU, you are not auto-opted in.
Correct. So not ‘everyone’ is opted in by default. Just the people without privacy laws…
What’s it going to do?
Tell stories how “a man walked and saved universe” and end every sentence with “agree?”?
If you don't want them to train models with the data you give them, don't give them data. They should be able to train whatever they want with it without regulation and there's no reason to request permission.
I'm so glad I left linkedin years ago and never went back.
I get a spike of anxiety if I even see the LinkedIn name in an email header.
I also deleted about 1-2 years ago. I’ve been wondering if I will regret it next time I am looking for work. Have you been in that position yet? I am seeking validation that I didn’t screw my future self over lol. Despite how truly awful the platform is, it’s still ubiquitous…
How was working for LinkedIn?
Just visit r/LinkedInLunatics to get all the best LI content
Can’t help but wonder how much of what’s posted to LinkedIn today is already the output of an LLM. So their AI tool will, in the limit, be trained on the output of other AI tools…
I pay for LinkedIn Premium, and I was just "opted in".
This disregard for your customers is very typical now. Not even a "how do you do" or a popup informing me of this change to my "preferences".
What do you use premium for? Apart from linkedin learning, I found no valid use. I was getting fake messages which are literally just ads even when I had premium.
For me it's because when I was actively looking for a role without Premium, LI started to block me from viewing people's profiles half way through each month, saying I was looking at too many profiles a month for the free tier, so I had to get premium to keep reading.
I had no idea; I didn't think I was reading many and I wasn't doing it systematically, just being curious.
After getting Premium, I could see who viewed my profile and how many views over time, which I felt was useful. It tells me about personalised top jobs, and it sometimes comes up with things I wouldn't have searched for that do seem interesting. Nothing ever came of those as jobs, but I've learned about companies doing interesting things which overlap my skillset as a result.
There's also the ability to send more messages a month to people I'm not connected with, but I write so rarely that's never been an issue.
I'm still on Premium by choice, but I still get the fake message ads, spammer connection requests and promoted ad posts.
In the end, my last 3 jobs were obtained via LinkedIn, the current one was via a LinkedIn social post which caused me to write to the poster, and a field I work in now (zero-knowledge proofs) is because of a conference someone talked about on LinkedIn. Many plausibly good contracts are advertised only as LI social posts, not even as LI jobs. So it's undoubtedly valuable to me for work, and valuable to have parasocial connections on it (to see those posts), even if it is a strange mixture of fake platitudes and real but self-interested posts.
Sometimes I want to send a "cold" message.
EU here, I don't have this option in Settings.
Can confirm, I am from the EU (PL) and don't see such option. But I saw one that mentions passing data to third parties for "social, economic, and workplace research" and I took the opportunity to switch that off.
UK here, and I do have that setting.
Despite the UK still having the data protection act.
Me too, but I wonder if it's actually a GDPR perk or maybe some regional A/B kind of thing. Or whatever. I mean, I am not sure if it's a good news or a bad news.
Perhaps it's not about whether there's regulation in place, but about how afraid LI is of it being enforced?
Yeah same, I am so sad about the things we miss here because of GDPR.
You may want to mark sarcasm on the Internet.
Having your data mined for AI?
Aside from cookie banners GDPR is mostly a feature.
Social media websites could use AI to simply generate posts. I mean, why not? User engagement is all that counts, it doesn't matter by what means and at what moral costs, right?
I don't mean fake users (although I wouldn't put corporate greed beyond trying to fake users). It could be sold as a helpful feature, like summaries of workplace happenings, news, world events, or discussions on the platform in the feeds. Of course, they would need to be filtered for ethical alignment with the social media company, as well as community safety, naturally... Certain political opinions may be less safe than others, and so on...
> Social media websites could use AI to simply generate posts. I mean, why not? User engagement is all that counts, it doesn't matter by what means and at what moral costs, right?
It is already happening with engagement farming users, so a platform doing it to make itself look more active is not a stretch at all. Reddit did that sort of astroturfing the old fashioned way back when it was starting up, so there is at least one well documented precedent already.
Reddit founders created alts and posted with them to give the impression of a thriving community back in the beginning. Now that could all be automated. Bluesky will probably be the last "authentic" social media site, and even then, it's initial gain was from name recognition of the people starting it. From now on out ask yourself if you are joining a real community or something astroturfed.
Posting AI image spam to facebook, and producing tutorials about it are both tidy little cottage industries now. It is so voluminous and predictable that it's hard to believe facebook are not quietly giving it a pass as an arm's-length experiment on automated content.
User: "my dad just died"
AI: "Thats great, here are 10 B2B SaaS sales tricks to learn from a family death, first.."
Here is the best way to opt-out of LinkedIn crap, both of the company and of its users: https://www.wikihow.com/Delete-a-LinkedIn-Account
Why is this a surprise/shock and news?! Obviously- every company wants to leverage data they have to train whatever llm model they may have.
They scraped user data. It's worse than that time political campaigns targeted voters.
There will never be a technological solution to such problems. The only way to fight company's greed is regulation through strong legislation. Thanks to the GDPR, in the EU (extended to the European economic area) and in Switzerland, LinkedIn can't use their users personal data to train their AI. It is made clear in there FAQ [1]:
> Note that we do not currently train content-generating AI models from members located in the EU, EEA, or Switzerland.
Anyway, the best move is still to just get out of this platform [2]. LinkedIn has a history full of dark patterns and really bad behaviors concerning personal data. At some point they even impersonated their users by mailing their contacts (sometimes shadily scrapped) in their name without the impersonated user consent or knowledge.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a5538339
[2] https://www.wikihow.com/Delete-a-LinkedIn-Account
Dear LinkedIn, i don't care about your new shiny AI. Fix your primary features first, like the jobs tab doesn't show anything for me in any company, your job search is amateur (I could have implemented it better) and website and application are always laggy and overheating my iPhone or m1 after a couple minutes.
You know for once, I'm not even that mad about something like this. Mostly because I literally never do anything on LinkedIn other than once in a month check my messages there.
I'd love to see the slew of AI-generated garbage, since it'll be completely indistinguishable from regular LI "content"!
AI detector score for sentences starting with "humbled by ..."
It will be a great leader and thinker…
Again, why is there an expectation for a company to do X and not Y with data you give them for free? They can do pretty much anything they want including not securing it. As nearly every single US company does.
Dam linkedin content is so bad and cringey this AI tool might get the crown as the most cringe AI model.
I am surprised that people are suprised by this. I assume that any social or professional network is using my data for training and selling ads. And I share things accordingly.
Please no.. trash in - trash out! Also, you don’t need to train anything, you can generate a very “successful” LinkedIn post easily:
https://viralpostgenerator.taplio.com/
I'm EU based, I don't see this option under my settings. Maybe it is currently tested only on US entities or hopefully our legal framework about privacy prevents such disgraceful practices
speaking from my own experiences, linkedin does not seem to have any more introspective text content than, say, facebook.
from the commercial/influencer side, many have taken the AI route already by using LLMs to help write or spice up their posts. even for paid users, the site allows to help you write your bio or certain types of pieces for the past few quarters.
maybe the posts of the yesteryear and like the comments section seems like a "valuable" source for them really. although it would be a bit more scary if this is for video and photos too, although besides the headshots it has also been a lot of AI content in the tech space lately.
This AI model is gonna be annoying as hell.
At least LinkedIn is simply banal. Google training their AI on Reddit is actively malicious.
Looking forward to the AI that is just really excited to tell you it has a new IT certification or promotion from mediocre middle-manager position X to mediocre middle manager position Y.
Opt-out is a powerful design choice, but in this case is a clear misuse.
When everyone agreed to LinkedIn’s terms, no one agreed at the time to have their personal data used to train AI.
From one of the tweets in the thread:
> LinkedIn seems to have auto enrolled folks in the US, but hearing from folks in the EU that they are not seeing this listed in their settings (likely due to privacy regulations).
Honestly, GDPR looks like a godsend! It came just at the right time!
[dupe]
An actual article: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/18/linkedin-scraped-user-data...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41582951)
Title should read: “LinkedIn is now using everyone’s ‘content’ to train their AI tool”
It might be cool if we eventually got some sort of a LinkedIn co-pilot to help with applying for jobs, but then again, who knows
What's so cool about competing with 5,000 low effort applications that can't be achieved right now competing with 50?
all linkedin content already now feels ai-generated. the transformer being b & c players regurgitating other people's motivational stories and "humbled" announcement posts and of course with a selfie attached to it for no reason other than the algorithm
Not everyone. EU residents don’t seem to be affected at the moment. But it still sucks
Can't they just do what everyone else does and steal other sites' content?
Yes, finally a ThoughtLeaderAI. Will Turing test be able to differentiate between current CVs of LinkedIn users and the one to be generated by ThoughtLeaderAI.
I’ve been using AI to write my LI posts, technically it is AI trained on AI data:) How is it going to affect the quality?
Because if there's one thing the world needs more of it's LinkedIn feed spam.
As a morbid fan of linkedinfluencer nonsense, I'm eager to see this.
Someone filled in https://www.linkedin.com/not-applicable today on their job app, and I have to admit, that was clever. I don't personally like that we make that field required.
wait until someone takes that url as theirs
AI will write the subreddit r/LinkedInLunatics content. It may be less cringey going forward.
An AI that understands exactly who the main talent is across the global supply chain will be very valuable.
That's not a thing a contemporary LLM can do. At best it will be able to know which buzzwords are popular, which will then immediately deteriorate their usefulness once everybody starts generating AI-optimized noise for their LinkedIn profiles.
It could be, but current "ai" doesn't "understand" anything, and this model isn't it.
Y'all will never convince me that the majority of content on LinkedIn hasn't been machine generated for years now. Some of the SEO-optimised corporate-speak drivel on there makes ChatGPT look like Shakespeare.
i just hate that they turned it on by default
Not in Europe, it seems?
By "everyone", they mean LinkedIn customers, correct? Or is LinkedIn scraping the Web now?
How will we ever tell the difference. Oh no.
I mean, if all of the linkedin "content" was generated by an AI, no one would really notice, and it will be. It's just an online CV / proposal / interview booking website, the rest is just some funny guy attempt to make it look like facebook. It's actually strange to me that they did not attempt to copy instagram stories, tinder swipe-cards or any of those once popular clubhouse audio rooms, maybe they want all of them still....
garbage in garbage out
What did they expect from a Microsoft company?
LinkedIn content? My god... poor AI.
A bot trained on LinkedIn content. Good God.
garbage in, garbage out ?
the new way all these online services suck
nice, AI trained on a nihilist corpus. it will be so stunning and brave.
LOL so it'll be an AI entirely based on bragging, self-promotion, lies and exaggerations. Nice.
I'm curious to hear from anyone who actually pays for LinkedIn, did they fuck you over too?
Yup.
This is your kindly reminder that if you're not the customer, then you are the product, with an added caveat that, when it comes to social networks, you are always the product.
I say that as a happy product, uhh, user of every social network out there.
LinkedIn actually has a lot of customers. I know many are free users, but it’s not like Facebook where the vast majority aren’t paying anything.
I think it’s fair to say that you can be both ‘the product’ and a customer at the same time.
That’s totally fair and likely very common the more I think about it.
If you're not paying, you're the product.
If you're paying, you're also the product.
You’re right, this is probably true quite often.
Take payroll companies. Their customers pay a lot for the service and in all but one case I’m aware of, the customers’ data is being sold.
Prepare to be flooded with trite aphorisms, vacuous top-10 lists, queeze-inducing personal announcements and 'acceptance' speeches, and other toxic positivity.
This will be interesting.
Because with a dataset like this...
...all the content will be below the imaginary "read more" fold!
so wait that means the model will be able to identify me in other data sets right
Well now we will have the most cringe AI model. Congrats to LinkedIn lol
Make money. Build chips. Eat electricity.
shame nobody scraped them years ago! ... oh, wait.
ThoughtLeader AI
/s