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.
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.
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.
These are the rubes who buy into the desperate messaging that AI is "inevitable". It doesn't occur to them that their behavior is absurd and empty because they think it's what everyone else is doing too. Why question a decision you see as outside the boundary of your free will?
I especially detest the constant romanticization of losing sleep, injuries, and abusing oneself to achieve a business result, which seems to be a constant theme of most of this AI generated content. Some of the incidents might be real but they shouldn't be romanticized.
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 was dead before you or I or anyone else even realized that it could die. We're just zombies stumbling around in this undead wasteland, going through the motions that we used to do when it was still alive. Ironically, the thing that killed it were the tools people employed to keep the robots out.
Once those were in place, no one could ever follow in Google's footsteps, which meant search could never work again not even in theory. And the same robots that people were murdering the internet to keep out were welcomed in through the service entry and started writing all the content: now not only could search never work again, but there wouldn't be anything worth searching for. And if all of that wasn't enough to really depress you, there's the fact that social media made it impossible to ignore that none of us like each other very much.
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)
This shows that a lot of neologisms that people think of as ‘AI speak’ are often older and common terms but from an unfamiliar domain (like the corporate world or academia).
I suppose it stands to reason: LLMs were trained on human writing, and overuse certain tropes and patterns because those patterns are commonly represented in human writing. But many people aren't particularly adept writers, and they're going to turn to AI to either do their writing or inform how they write. The trope ends up reinforcing itself as people just start to think that AI output is just what normal writing looks like.
The actual prose is ham fisted, but the structural bits - “why it matters” headings and bulleted content are traditional clickbait. Compare to “the results may surprise you” and similar stock phrases that we roll our eyes at. This stuff has always hooked people so it’s unsurprising that RLHF got its way.
If you want examples look at popular DIY magazines from a decade ago, they’re full of this sort of material where every article subheading has a catchy sentence.
I think this is just a sign that AI is now participating in the normal evolution of language over time. Language has always been about imitating... someone or some group comes up with a word/phrase/saying and uses it, other people hear/read it, and if they like it and/or find it useful, they incorporate it into their lexicon. This process is constant, and words and phrases are tweaked and morphed over the years as trends come and go.
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.
One thing I have yet to see on the mainstream AI platforms is a combination of foul language, dirty jokes and racial slurs. 4chan-GPT excluded. Perhaps require Rule34 as proof. There's probably a way to jailbreak that for a little bit but it would get patched.
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.
It is the opposite for me. AI loves terms like "you've just hit upon ..." or "it's the holy grail" or "The X Trap" so much that I internally cringe when I see them, and would avoid using them.
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.
Who is hiring has become a scam. I followed it for years and lately I noticed a large cohort of companies (including YC startups) doing shadow listings. The same positions being constantly advertised, month by month, not being filled in this job market?
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.
Ghost jobs are a real thing, and they create so much noise and make it harder to find the signal when job searching. Also, a lot of job search websites don't even have a category for "remote anywhere." When they say "remote" what that usually means is "remote in the USA" or "remote in the EU" which isn't helpful to someone living outside of those regions.
To be fair it’s been pretty useful for me for finding jobs by looking for a relevant person and messaging them. I don’t do it very often and have probably > 50% rate of a cold message leading to further discussions (just to indicate I’m not spamming and only doing it when there’s a real possibility of a fit).
I agree the actual “job search” functionality is useless, maybe it has some value for more junior people.
That aside I used to scroll it fairly often to see updates or relevant posts. But it’s some combination of algorithm and LLMs, the feed is now useless, it’s all just people I don’t know posting slope about someone “just said the quiet part out loud” or whatever, with the obligatory GPT slop photo. It’s unrecognizable vs a few years ago.
It's good for connecting through the network and picking up new projects. I have a small ~100 people network and even I get results. Stricly through my network, not jobs, not direct service requests or their sales tools.
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.
I also prefer to have a smaller network of people I actually know. I haven’t found LinkedIn to be a very valuable channel for finding new clients, but it’s always nice to see past colleagues being successful at finding new roles or starting new ventures, and occasionally it’s been helpful for finding someone to provide a reference for me or vice versa.
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.
I found smashing the "not interested in this" button consistently for a few days greatly reduced "slop about AI" if not AI slop. It's irksome that so many people are having convo's with ChatGPT about "What AI all means" who don't know enough to have a worthwhile opinion and then posting blog posts based on this as if anyone cares. I hardly see it anymore. But then again, I am just on LinkedIn to post photos and connect with students because... they're the last LIONs.
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.
Came here to say the same thing which I was pretty shocked at. Engaging in flame wars on a site that's supposed to be for professionals was really eye opening.
It’s so bad I can’t even believe they allow it. It’s just slop everywhere, even the posts complaining about AI slop are also AI slop which is pretty incredible.
Where are you all successfully looking for jobs? Indeed was even worse then LinkedIn.
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.
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.
Pangram does work, in the specific sense that when it says something was AI authored it is vanishingly unlikely that it was written by a human (who was not deliberately trying to write like an AI), and IMO getting people to recognize that we actually do have a decent solution in this space now is pretty important if we want the Internet to remain a place for humans and not just bot swarms.
> rule of three, em dashes, etc
You appear to be misinformed about how Pangram specifically works, it is not based on pattern detection of that sort. I recommend reading their whitepaper, it's a pretty understandable explanation of exactly how they trained their classifier.
It's trivial to see how many people think Pangram is absolute trash[1] (because it is).
> You appear to be misinformed about how Pangram specifically works, it is not based on pattern detection of that sort. I recommend reading their whitepaper, it's a pretty understandable explanation of exactly how they trained their classifier.
I did read their paper (which is, by the way, very scant on details), and they trained their classifier in the laziest way possible: here's a chunk of "human-written" text and here's a chunk of "AI-written" text, put them in the right bucket, and do this a zillion times. Literally zero sophistication. Also: what do you think "pattern recognition" is, if not a "classifier"?
I just tried it, created an account, and wrote a few sentences about how my day went. These sentences got classified as AI assisted, so clearly their classifier doesn't work that well.
" 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).
I find it kind of concerning that it's so much better to have serious (scientific or emotionally charged) discussions with a bot than with any human at all, online or in real life.
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.
Further than carefully selecting the articles I read? I don't understand... I occasionally watch a video on YouTube, but again it's carefully selected.
I feel like you're telling me that watching a video on YouTube is bad, but watching the exact same video on a DVD is "old school" and therefore better. I don't mind so much about the fact that I get it over the Internet, I care about quality. I subscribe to a handful of carefully-selected blogs through RSS as a way to easily see when they publish something new (which is rare, because it's quality).
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 362 ms ] threadI 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.
[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.
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).
Once those were in place, no one could ever follow in Google's footsteps, which meant search could never work again not even in theory. And the same robots that people were murdering the internet to keep out were welcomed in through the service entry and started writing all the content: now not only could search never work again, but there wouldn't be anything worth searching for. And if all of that wasn't enough to really depress you, there's the fact that social media made it impossible to ignore that none of us like each other very much.
Get out of the corporate internet to find humans again.
The llms usually remind me of how corporate people talk
We no longer meet, we jump on a call.
That's factually untrue. Give me a link to a pre-2020 piece of writing that sounds like an LLM.
If you want examples look at popular DIY magazines from a decade ago, they’re full of this sort of material where every article subheading has a catchy sentence.
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.
I think that's kinda wonderful, actually.
Skullface from MGS5 predicted this. Hideo Kojima sends his regards.
I wonder if long disfavored words like "ain't" might make a comeback as a proof 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.
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.
I agree the actual “job search” functionality is useless, maybe it has some value for more junior people.
That aside I used to scroll it fairly often to see updates or relevant posts. But it’s some combination of algorithm and LLMs, the feed is now useless, it’s all just people I don’t know posting slope about someone “just said the quiet part out loud” or whatever, with the obligatory GPT slop photo. It’s unrecognizable vs a few years ago.
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.
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.
Yep. My LinkedIn feed is now polluted with the same political, rage content that made me exit Facebook 10 years ago. It sucks.
I barely go on there any more its gotten so bad.
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.
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.
> rule of three, em dashes, etc
You appear to be misinformed about how Pangram specifically works, it is not based on pattern detection of that sort. I recommend reading their whitepaper, it's a pretty understandable explanation of exactly how they trained their classifier.
It's trivial to see how many people think Pangram is absolute trash[1] (because it is).
> You appear to be misinformed about how Pangram specifically works, it is not based on pattern detection of that sort. I recommend reading their whitepaper, it's a pretty understandable explanation of exactly how they trained their classifier.
I did read their paper (which is, by the way, very scant on details), and they trained their classifier in the laziest way possible: here's a chunk of "human-written" text and here's a chunk of "AI-written" text, put them in the right bucket, and do this a zillion times. Literally zero sophistication. Also: what do you think "pattern recognition" is, if not a "classifier"?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/1rm11rs/pangram_c...
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.
Further than carefully selecting the articles I read? I don't understand... I occasionally watch a video on YouTube, but again it's carefully selected.
I feel like you're telling me that watching a video on YouTube is bad, but watching the exact same video on a DVD is "old school" and therefore better. I don't mind so much about the fact that I get it over the Internet, I care about quality. I subscribe to a handful of carefully-selected blogs through RSS as a way to easily see when they publish something new (which is rare, because it's quality).