- If you're a job seeker, most of the jobs are fake for pretend growth optics. - If you're a senior level or executive you're targeted non-stop by sales people telling you about "the conversations they're having ..." - If you're looking for actual thought leadership or interesting information, you're bombarded with random tik-tok style videos, totally contrived stories and "lessons" to how ordering at Starbucks is like managing cloud infrastructure

It's turned into a completely artificial and useless community because Microsoft chased the same growth and engagement metrics as Facebook did, now no one considers it to be a place for serious discussion.

Boy, was it controversial. I could not believe how hard some people were pushing back in the comments.

Quoting from myself there:

"When you write your own words, you are forging your own voice. It is distinctive, conveys your unique world view, and connects with others in a way that is specific to you alone.

If you use an AI tool to write for you instead, you lose all of that."

That seems blindingly self-evident to me, but apparently a lot of folks disagree.

Something else I said:

"Writing is hard because thinking is hard. When you write, you forge your thoughts, distinctions, mental models and even feelings into the clarity of precision that the written word demands. When you outsource your writing to an AI tool, you lose more than you know."

I guess a lot of people don't want to bother with all that.

In the last few years I have been going back to RSS feeds, subscribing to blogs I like. What I lose there is that I don't get suggestions for blogs I don't already know.

I genuinely wonder if there could be an opportunity for webrings there. Like blogs could have an RSS feed of "blogs I follow" by the author, and I could choose to follow them or at least visit them and selectively subscribe.

The thing is that many times, there is one article I like in a blog but not necessarily the rest. So more than "blogs I follow", it could be "articles I liked". So that if I subscribe to the RSS feed of someone, I get exposed to articles they "bookmarked", and eventually it can help me discover blogs I want to subscribe to.

Or maybe it all exists already. Or used to exist, probably.

It's not exactly the same thing, of course, but still interesting the extent to which this type of content is viewed as the business opportunity for him.

I started to see articles about mycorrhizal fungi pop up on sites and LLMs. In January of 2026 an evolutionary biologist won a prize regarding the fungi, there were some interviews and media items surrounding it. But then I could trace the original media items to AI content aggregators, which led to other AI generated posts about mycorrhizal fungi, and some of that entered LLM training data, causing LLMs to bring up the topic.

And here I am, a human, writing about it, which may get consumed into training pipelines and help disseminate the idea into the future even further.

Of course, I invariably found those LLM posts to be vacuous and pointless and so it was very easy to begin skimming right past them as I figured out they were cut from the same cloth.

To LinkedIn's credit, though: in 2020 I landed "my pandemic job", a dream job that was 100% remote (thanks to the lockdowns) and had a 100% flexible schedule and I had a really great time with the enjoyable work I was doing.

This job was somehow landed through LinkedIn. To this day, I cannot recall how or when I applied to the company. But I know I was filling out "1-Click Apply" forms there, and I had splashed up my involvement with the community college (though I would not actually graduate from college for another 3 years) and eventually a recruiter telephoned me to ask if I was interested. And as I was juggling some crazy issues in my personal life along with the pandemic lockdowns, I had to assure the recruiter multiple times: yes I'm interested, no please do not hang up, yes please let us continue with your process!

And it was that sort of tenacity that landed the initial job, and helped me hang on to this employer through M&A and multiple job-role changes. They formally terminated me about 4 times, but I was hired 5 times so it sort of evened out, I suppose.

If it were not for LinkedIn or community college, that recruiter never would've found me. I never would've got that job. My life would be so different, especially my pandemic-lockdown life! So grateful.

Ironically, my employer (EdTech industry) began to 100% embrace LLMs for their students and even offered a front-page LLM for students to ask about their homework, and other assignments. It was definitely crazy times for us, as we were the ones tasked with detecting plagiarism and other types of cheating in that homework, while students were being actively encouraged to tap into LLM-based resources for answers...

On Instagram, I'll get fed "real" content, but you read the description and it's this giant 3-4 paragraph thing that I don't bother to read because I know with certainty that it's AI slop. Before AI, the descriptions of sports videos or meme videos were 2 sentences, now they're entire theses.

The only people left reading this crap are people that still haven't caught up with the concept of AI slop

[1] https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-detectors-biased-against-no...

1) Glorified Rolodex

2) Place too see which of my peers got promoted or moved dormant

3) Source material for /r/linkedinlunatics

Reading the crap in the feed has never been a thing

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgoo

Now we have these tech-savvy people generating worthless images and producing generic, emoji-infested takeaways.

We've societally come to the consensus that, we want to reward a race to the bottom slop. passive scrollers by not doing anything about it, active posters by contributing to it.

but there is no way else to win in this game.

A friend of mine writes the most human curated thoughtful newsletter about AI, spending 100 hours. and maybe 200 people know of its existence.

What I don't get is how these people don't feel shame in their super obvious blatant use of LLMs for everything, even responding to posts. Maybe it's just me but when I'm attaching things to my name like that, I would absolutely not want everything to be obviously slop shit. Do they think people can't tell or something? I know at least every technical person I know can immediately tell (most of the time) when writing is LLM generated.

If anything, I think people are triggered by it all because it exposes something more deep in people -- most people don't want to admit most of their lives have been wasted in front of a computer. But here we are. So stop complaining and start coming up with more creative uses of AI writing if you have a problem with it.

If I see a post that starts with this type of sentence structure I don't even bother to read any of it. I feelt like this happens on LinkedIn the most, so I'm happy to finally have some data to back up my observations.

Pangram tries to look for common patterns (rule of three, em dashes, etc.) but these are heuristic methods and not to be taken as gospel. There is no provable method to make a distinction between AI and human-generated other than the fact that AI-generated text tends to reek of pseudo-intellectual undergrad with a thesaurus.