Posted by mukmuk 2 hours ago
> 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)
- 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.
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.
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.
Maybe, but it continues to be one of the best places to find work.
I used to have decent luck with Who is hiring threads but not recently as there's relatively little for mid level engineers.
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.
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.
Yep. My LinkedIn feed is now polluted with the same political, rage content that made me exit Facebook 10 years ago. It sucks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's bleak out there, on the internet.
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_.
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
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 problem is when I can eventually tell the difference.
I want a social media again where I actually just see my friends (my friends use Discord for this and it works okay).
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.
Skullface from MGS5 predicted this. Hideo Kojima sends his regards.
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.
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.