1) It’s deception. Posts purportedly written by a person are actually being generated by machines. People should not be encouraged to claim authorship of something they didn’t write.
2) Genuinely good posts are drowned in slop. Such a large proportion of posts are vapid AI-generated listicles or trite stories that I’m sure I miss out on posts that are actually worth reading. What a shame that posts written by people who invest their time and effort are lost in the deluge.
3) It’s homogenising in an unsettling way. Many AI-written posts follow a familiar narrative arch journeying from a problem or question designed to catch the reader’s attention to an action or insight, then to a neat conclusion including a call to action designed to maximise post engagement. AI-written posts also tend to be stylistically similar. We recognise the hallmarks. The one sentence paragraphs. The rhetorical questions. The all-too-easy transformations with ambiguous meanings: “turning insights into value.” Bleurgh.
4) It enrols people in the influencer/attention economy – and via a shortcut rather than a skill. Social media companies are already winning the war for our attention, with the aim of selling products to us via targeted ads and influencers. We don’t need to reinforce a dynamic that encourages everyone to be a “thought leader” and then offers them a machine to do their “thinking” for them. Write if you enjoy writing. Write if you want to order your thoughts. Write if it’s your job. But don’t fake-write because you see others doing it and feel pressure to do the same.
As LinkedIn won’t ban AI-written posts, here are some suggestions:
1) Don’t write them or engage with them.
2) If you use AI to research, edit, translate, or write some or all of a post, include an explicit acknowledgement of the role AI played.