LinkedIn Is the Fakest Platform of Them All

Prospect magazine, in a recent piece: 'LinkedIn doesn't know me anymore,' someone complained to me recently. 'What do you mean?' I asked. She explained that the platform has replaced the old 'recommended jobs' section, which used to show her quite useful job openings based on her previous searches and CV, with an AI search engine that asks you to describe your ideal job in freeform text. The results it brings up aren't nearly as relevant.

This is just one of many ways in which the professionals' social media platform, which has embraced artificial intelligence with ferocious zeal, is being gradually 'enshittified,' to borrow tech writer Cory Doctorow's phrase. Each new embrace of AI tools promises to make hiring, job searching, networking and even posting a bit easier or more fruitful. Instead, AI seems to have made the user's experience more alienating, and to have helped foster a genre of LinkedIn-speak which bears all the hallmarks of the worst AI writing on the internet.

Let's start with my opening example -- which, to be fair, is in beta testing mode and can be switched off. Instead of the AI assistant being like an intuitive digital servant, pulling up the best jobs based on your ruminations, users are confronted with a new and annoying task: crafting prompts for the AI. But the non-AI search bar worked perfectly well as it was.

Then there is the AI writing assistant, which is available to users who pay for the platform's $40 per month premium service to help them craft their posts. LinkedIn's CEO Ryan Roslansky recently admitted that users aren't using the tool as much as he anticipated. It seems that sounding like a human being to your colleagues and clients is put at, well, a premium.

And then there are the ways in which users are deploying outputs from external AI chatbots on the platform, something with which LinkedIn is struggling to cope. According to the New York Times, the number of job applications submitted via the platform increased by 45 per cent in the year to June, now clocking in at an average of 11,000 per minute.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.