You know how Facebook lost all its utility when it stopped being about your friends and turned into all ads and engagement bait? LinkedIn seems to be going the same way.
Fake recruiters are bad enough (I report them almost daily), but it's now promoting the worst of the AI hyperbole and fake expertise. If I'm just scrolling the home page, about 3 in 5 posts are by random people with "CEO" or "founder" in their title, appended by AI something something, each declaring that something is dead, something is killing something else, you should have FOMO, the end is near or something else that's ridiculous. Especially when it comes to AI, these cats haven't been using it any longer than the rest of us, so what makes them qualified to know anything?
And I know the algorithm is broken, because I've gamed it myself. In the last six weeks, my posts have collectively seen about 250k views. The Internets say that's "viral" by LinkedIn standards. I hit those views because I carefully worded my posts with the right keywords, while I commented on the right posts.
(It's worth mentioning that all of this exposure has not, in fact, landed me a new job, so I wouldn't say that I'm "winning.")
AI tooling has made coding fun again for this engineering manager, and my side project, the social app, had made me confident in its use. And while a lot of energy is being expended figuring out the best way to use the tech, the outcome, working software, seems to be an afterthought. While coding accounts for a disproportionate cost of product development, the practice itself is a fairly small part of that development. It was never the biggest part.
Humans are still required. AI cannot create novel design, it cannot innovate. It has no judgment. Left unsupervised, it generates code that will not scale and is not secure. Think about what an LLM is. It's an algorithm that finds patterns, trained on patterns it finds on the public Internet. While there's some good code on the Internet, most of it is bad. If you don't have the experience to tell it what good looks like, it will mimic what it knows.
So if you encounter AI "influencers" on the LinkedIn. Dislike, keep scrolling. It's mostly noise. If you're a business leader, don't buy what they're selling.
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