I opened LinkedIn this morning and found a “suggested” item right at the very top. It was followed by a “promoted” post and then a link from someone I actually follow. The fourth entry in my stream was “suggested” too. That’s where I stopped.
The two suggested items – that means I didn’t ask for them – were totally irrelevant. The first appeared to have been created or at least partially created by AI. After clicking “see more” it displayed a grab-bag of bullet points that looked like they were pulled from the first page of a Google search.
Many AI results have the same ingredients. It looks like the bot just searched the web for a topic, clicked on the first three or four links, scraped their content, and then placed a summary in an unordered list.
The term “promoted” on LinkedIn just means advertising. This ad was for an American Express Gold card. I have no problem with its inclusion.
I was glad to see an item from the Bahnsen Group next. While I didn’t click this particular link, I have a moderate interest in almost everything they post. Their Thoughts on Money and Dividend Cafe podcasts are always good. Unfortunately, I don’t see many of them. They are links. Links are seen by fewer people. Their preview sizes have even been reduced “to encourage native posting.” This means those who ask followers to leave the LinkedIn platform are facing (essentially) the suppression of their posts.
I’m not sure what suggested item number two was about. It was from a man in India who works in an industry I know nothing about. In fact, I didn’t even understand the title or description of his job. As I said, it was irrelevant.
There was no need to continue beyond four posts. This was, like many of my visits to the app or website, a rather disappointing exercise. Suggested posts seem to outnumber posts by my 481 actual connections, and the 13 people and 46 pages I thought I was following. And while I don’t object to advertising (it’s a free app), there seems to be a few more than usual these days.
Between the algorithm’s questionable suggestions, the obviously AI generated content, and the relevant (or not so relevant) ads, I find this app, which I used to enjoy, less and less helpful.
The “influencers” teaching “effective” strategies on the platform aren’t helping. They have joined LinkedIn itself in encouraging the use of AI for generating almost everything, including graphics, text, and even full videos.
The only expertise some insist we need is prompt-writing. Give bots the right command and let them do the rest!
I would still rather hear from a human I chose to follow, see items they have created, thought about, and written themselves, maybe even visiting a website they built for a change. Perhaps there’s a prompt for that?