LinkedOut

Seen on LinkedIn:

Here's my interpretation of what is happening:

• The author, someone whose profile indicates they work in generative AI, makes a funny post about generative AI - it's evidently meant to be funny.
• The joke is lost on AI bots, and comments that missed the joke flood his timeline (more than 60 at time of writing).
• The author himself is using an AI auto-response tool, which also missed the joke.

The users aren't the problem - they are all playing the game, in order to get "engagement". The problem is the game being played. For LinkedIn, engagement = money.

What this means is that the quality of the content doesn't matter. Only the quantity. But as the quantity grows, so does competition for attention. And as competition for attention grows, people are incentivized to post even more in order to get more engagement, or any at all.

You can't scale quality, but you can scale quantity.

I've seen many authors on LinkedIn come out and say they wouldn't respond to comments anymore, because of the flood of AI content which isn't worth their time responding to, or even reading.

The thing is, Generative AI allows us to scale content creation to unprecedented levels. There's a much larger discussion to be had about AI-generated slop (See this, for example), but in the case of LinkedIn, this means that a large portion of users is basically just "cheating" at the game.

In games like Diablo IV, people using bots get banned because it ruins the game for others. Why even try to be good if someone can just have a bot level up his character 24/7? No amount of good gameplay can compete with that. If you play the game for the game's sake, you might not care. But companies, entrepreneurs, brands and influencers are on social media to be seen, recognized. The moment the game becomes about quantity and not quality, they either follow or stop playing.

Either way, all that's left on the platform is a bunch of bots talking to each others, with no actual insight, thought, creativity or actual human connection. It's not social media anymore, it's asocial media.