LinkedIn is really the first place I experienced LLM-generated content at scale. I did not know it at the time. I just figured, because the corporate world tends to adopt standards/templates and coalesce around a certain lingo, that this was the way people were posting to LI social media. But indeed as I later found out, there were many classic LLM tells built into all those posts.

Of course, I invariably found those LLM posts to be vacuous and pointless and so it was very easy to begin skimming right past them as I figured out they were cut from the same cloth.

To LinkedIn's credit, though: in 2020 I landed "my pandemic job", a dream job that was 100% remote (thanks to the lockdowns) and had a 100% flexible schedule and I had a really great time with the enjoyable work I was doing.

This job was somehow landed through LinkedIn. To this day, I cannot recall how or when I applied to the company. But I know I was filling out "1-Click Apply" forms there, and I had splashed up my involvement with the community college (though I would not actually graduate from college for another 3 years) and eventually a recruiter telephoned me to ask if I was interested. And as I was juggling some crazy issues in my personal life along with the pandemic lockdowns, I had to assure the recruiter multiple times: yes I'm interested, no please do not hang up, yes please let us continue with your process!

And it was that sort of tenacity that landed the initial job, and helped me hang on to this employer through M&A and multiple job-role changes. They formally terminated me about 4 times, but I was hired 5 times so it sort of evened out, I suppose.

If it were not for LinkedIn or community college, that recruiter never would've found me. I never would've got that job. My life would be so different, especially my pandemic-lockdown life! So grateful.

Ironically, my employer (EdTech industry) began to 100% embrace LLMs for their students and even offered a front-page LLM for students to ask about their homework, and other assignments. It was definitely crazy times for us, as we were the ones tasked with detecting plagiarism and other types of cheating in that homework, while students were being actively encouraged to tap into LLM-based resources for answers...

almost all platforms are like this now. Every active player in each of these platform is trying to get the most eyeballs in their content / profile. and the silent scrollers are not contributing anything else anyway.

We've societally come to the consensus that, we want to reward a race to the bottom slop. passive scrollers by not doing anything about it, active posters by contributing to it.

but there is no way else to win in this game.

A friend of mine writes the most human curated thoughtful newsletter about AI, spending 100 hours. and maybe 200 people know of its existence.

Pangram doesn't work, and I wish people would stop treating it as gospel (but the AI/anti-AI grift is real). Here's a fun paradox: I can literally tell ChatGPT: "Say X" and it will say "X"—so that's a case where content is both AI generated and not. What if it changes a few words? Moves some sentences around? Where does something go from human- to AI-generated? (This is the classic Sorites paradox.)

Pangram tries to look for common patterns (rule of three, em dashes, etc.) but these are heuristic methods and not to be taken as gospel. There is no provable method to make a distinction between AI and human-generated other than the fact that AI-generated text tends to reek of pseudo-intellectual undergrad with a thesaurus.

LinkedIn is basically unusable at this point. I actually did used to use it a fair amount before but I've since deleted it and just use email notifications to see any notifications from recruiters.

What I don't get is how these people don't feel shame in their super obvious blatant use of LLMs for everything, even responding to posts. Maybe it's just me but when I'm attaching things to my name like that, I would absolutely not want everything to be obviously slop shit. Do they think people can't tell or something? I know at least every technical person I know can immediately tell (most of the time) when writing is LLM generated.

It's still pretty bad at pixel art, and just has this generic look visually. I remember watching this video of this indy game developer that tried to hire an artist for some visuals for cover art for his game, and kept getting sent AI generated stuff by scammers. Finally he did find a real artist, and the cover was really good. But expensive.

AI generated article to promote some product. What a great meta proof.

I mean, who the hell ever read that utter garbage on LinkedIn anyway?

Really no different than the content that is usually on LinkedIn. It's been a worthless dumpster fire for ten years at least.

the enslopification is pretty obnoxious.