Can confirm, this pushed me to delete the LinkedIn a few months ago and haven't looked back. It was at one time a professional portfolio, now I consider it a huge red flag if a company even questions why I do not have a LinkedIn. If you want references I will provide them. Social media is not a job requirement for any position I'm interested in.
The question is not whether something is AI generated. That's the default state now. Question whether it is human, the economics are exceedingly in the favor of this new normal.
https://javiergonzalez.io/blog/the-economics-of-slop/
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.
I'm convinced that the internet is mostly dead at this point. Sites like reddit or this one don't ask people for their identity. Nothing on here could be real and we'd be none the wiser.
The internet has never been more alive to me at this time, granted I spend very very little of my internet time on corporate internet but there are real communities out there. You might have to change your expectations (surprise! people don't post as often) but you can find a community if you want it, it just takes time and actual work filtering through the noise.
Get out of the corporate internet to find humans again.
Beyond the OP's AI-written or AI assisted distinction, I'm also noticing people mimicking LLM's speech patterns. I've read blogs from people who I'm quite sure are above pasting AI output directly into their words who nevertheless are sounding more and more like AI as the sum of all their conversations with Claude begins to rub off on them (myself included, probably)
Lately I have seem some Reddit posts with bullet points. I know it's a Power Point cliche, but that style almost never showed up on Reddit until about a year ago. I think a lot of those posts are AI-generated.
For a while I worked on defects for a web app at a large corporation. Users would submit walls of text, with a lot of unneeded details. A lot of people need help organizing their thoughts.
> I'm also noticing people mimicking LLM's speech patterns.
I've noticed this happening to myself. I use Claude Code quite a bit at work, and Claude tends to favor certain phrases, like, "the smoking gun", that I didn't use very often before. After encountering phrases like that frequently, I've found myself incorporating some of them into my own speech.
I'm feeling the same way. People naturally pick up writing habits from what they read, especially if they haven't really developed their own style yet. So it seems only natural that, after spending a lot of time reading AI generated text, some of those patterns start creeping into their own writing.
The less established someone's writing style or vocabulary is, the more susceptible they probably are to that influence. I don't necessarily see it as inherently good or bad. People have always picked up habits from the things they read. AI is just another source of influence, alongside books, blogs, journalists, or other writers. Some influences are great, and some are less so.
Maybe I don't use LinkedIn that much, but I saw it especially on X and Reddit... Just today I was on a Reddit post and saw so many AI sloppish comments from people trying to farm karma
It amusing that Musk attempted to reverse his purchase of Twitter by citing the number of bots, and then research like this comes out alleging that now 29% of the X's long form articles are fully AI.
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.
LinkedIn is definitely flooded with AI slop, but we also need to keep in mind that Pangram really doesn't work that well. I just tried it, wrote a few sentences about my day, and it was flagged as AI-generated (which doesn't surprise me since these tools are known to easily flag writing from people whose native language is not English [1]). I am really suspicious of the 0.1% false positive rate they claim to achieve.
Was just thinking today, -- happened to login to LinkedIn, open it up and the entire front page is just AI slop being applauded and liked with people seriously interacting with it as if it's somebody didn't just shit it out in 20s with zero effort. The whole thing needs to die so badly.
On Instagram, I'll get fed "real" content, but you read the description and it's this giant 3-4 paragraph thing that I don't bother to read because I know with certainty that it's AI slop. Before AI, the descriptions of sports videos or meme videos were 2 sentences, now they're entire theses.
The only people left reading this crap are people that still haven't caught up with the concept of AI slop
LinkedIn has become an AI-slopped wasteland. It’s like the opposite of when boomers found Facebook, which was the weirdest melting pot of zero-integrity posts and comments.
Now we have these tech-savvy people generating worthless images and producing generic, emoji-infested takeaways.
- 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.
I've managed to get quite a few interviews through LinkedIn jobs, though I'm looking for DevOps roles in particular, which may be an exception to the rule.
I hate LinkedIn so I wanna agree with you but it's actually a good place to get preliminary info. I doubt anyone actually reads the long feed content, though.
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.
" but we don't believe it's inevitable."
Best get believing pal, because not only is it inevitable, it represents the last evolution in our societies output. There will be slop from now until eternity. Recalibrate your aesthetics, because everything is going to look like model output.
The detection model is flawed, and snake-oil at best. 仕方がない (shikata ga nai).
My feeling is that it interferes a lot with "the social media algorithms" and hence with the "infinite wall of random stuff from people you don't know".
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.
You know, I'll be that guy and say the following: Since you stepped back in time, I went back even further. I just stopped consuming content on the web that isn't YouTube, this site, or Kagi News.
It's all crap in my estimation and I'm better off without it polluting my brain. Still need to kick HN & YouTube though, it's a WIP.
Maybe someday I'll regain the focus to read books in a single sitting again.
118 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgoo
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.
Get out of the corporate internet to find humans again.
I wonder if long disfavored words like "ain't" might make a comeback as proofs of humanity.
For a while I worked on defects for a web app at a large corporation. Users would submit walls of text, with a lot of unneeded details. A lot of people need help organizing their thoughts.
I've noticed this happening to myself. I use Claude Code quite a bit at work, and Claude tends to favor certain phrases, like, "the smoking gun", that I didn't use very often before. After encountering phrases like that frequently, I've found myself incorporating some of them into my own speech.
The less established someone's writing style or vocabulary is, the more susceptible they probably are to that influence. I don't necessarily see it as inherently good or bad. People have always picked up habits from the things they read. AI is just another source of influence, alongside books, blogs, journalists, or other writers. Some influences are great, and some are less so.
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.
[1] https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-detectors-biased-against-no...
On Instagram, I'll get fed "real" content, but you read the description and it's this giant 3-4 paragraph thing that I don't bother to read because I know with certainty that it's AI slop. Before AI, the descriptions of sports videos or meme videos were 2 sentences, now they're entire theses.
The only people left reading this crap are people that still haven't caught up with the concept of AI slop
Now we have these tech-savvy people generating worthless images and producing generic, emoji-infested takeaways.
- 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.
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.
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.
seen these around
It's all crap in my estimation and I'm better off without it polluting my brain. Still need to kick HN & YouTube though, it's a WIP.
Maybe someday I'll regain the focus to read books in a single sitting again.