The unholy trinity: Content Industrial Complex meets generative AI meets LinkedIn brain rot.
Automated Hustle
The unholy trinity of the Content Industrial Complex meets generative AI meets LinkedIn brain rot is finally here.
“When it comes to posting on LinkedIn, we’ve heard that you generally know what you want to say, but going from a great idea to a full-fledged post can be challenging and time-consuming,” Keren Baruch, director of product at LinkedIn, wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the site’s new generative AI-powered text assistant. “So, we’re starting to test a way for members to use generative AI directly within the LinkedIn share box.”
In other words, when you go to post on LinkedIn at some point in the presumably near future, an integrated generative AI tool will help you — to throw in a few LinkedIn buzzwords — maximize and accelerate your content creation productivity by essentially writing your post for you. But it’ll help you do so authentically, of course. Right?
“To start, you’ll need to share at least 30 words outlining what you want to say — this is your own thoughts and perspective and the core of any post,” Baruch’s post continues. “Then you can leverage generative AI to create a first draft.”
While a world in which soulless, self-lauding social media posts about productivity are automated quickly and potentially at incredible scale might be some folks’ worst nightmare, it honestly feels just about right for the site and its AI-loving hustle bro hype hive.
Nothing New
While LinkedIn’s forthcoming AI integration is an objectively goofy generative AI use case, it does seem to highlight how incredibly robotic the world of networking and job-hunting has become. From the formulaic and empty task of writing and sending emails to the ways we already structure our resumes for the sake of appealing to resume-reading algorithms, our workplace reality is already packed with automation — or at the very least, what feels like a tail-eating human reenactment of automation.
It also highlights our increasingly AI-heavy social media lives. Though social media has long been marketed as a digital means of human connection, various social media sites — Meta, Snapchat, and now LinkedIn — are hedging their AI bets by integrating the decidedly humanless generative AI into these digital spaces.
That said, to a lot of people, it’s likely true that none of these spaces have felt very genuine-connection-inducing for some time now. Still, these various AI integrations feel like the final nail in that old coffin.
Anyway, catch you on LinkedIn, where my AI-powered bot will respond to your AI-generated post about optimized growth empathy, or some other amalgamation of keywords that already feels like it was cooked up by a machine learning system.
More on social media’s automated future: Zuckerberg Announces Bold Plan to Jam AI into “Every Single One of Our Products”