LinkedIn's continuous slide into AI nothingness
What happens when LinkedIn is running out of ideas for innovation and growth?
It turns to AI, of course!
Remember its foray into AI?
You might recall my post, 'LinkedIn on its way to Artificial Stupidity,' from more than a year ago. At that time, a product manager at LinkedIn started promoting the ability to create content using AI. This product manager was asking for feedback. Despite my feedback — 'This whole idea is generally very stupid' — AI supported content generation is alive and kicking there.
Obviously, the deployment of AI on LinkedIn has been nothing but a smashing success.
The above-mentioned product manager got promoted from 'Director of Product Management' to 'Director of Product, Flagship Generative AI Products.'
As any other organization introducing AI into its feature list as a thing you can't live without, LinkedIn too needs data to train its AI.
You might be wondering where LinkedIn can find the data, and which websites will be scraped to find the troves of content to make its AI the best.
Of course, right in its backyard. Or, better said — from all the content which the users generate there.
Here are a few recent news articles about that:
The Washington Post - LinkedIn is training AI on you — unless you opt out with this setting
PC World - LinkedIn is training AI with your data. Here’s how to opt out ASAP. Its deck headline was 'Thought you couldn't hate LinkedIn more? You were wrong.'
Ars Technica - How to stop LinkedIn from training AI on your data
The responses from LinkedIn users on LinkedIn or on other forums are mostly unprintable. Let's just say they were on the list of words banned by the FCC on broadcast TV.
But rather than listening to upset people, it might be better to learn directly from LinkedIn. There is an extensive 'LinkedIn and generative AI (GAI) FAQ' where, among other things, you learn that LinkedIn might share the data with its affiliates. Microsoft is mentioned as an example.
Also, you learn that '...we do not currently train content-generating AI models from members located in the EU, EEA, UK, or Switzerland.' I guess the content from these countries doesn’t make sense to any AI.
Additionally, LinkedIn is very specific about the use of the data: 'LinkedIn deploys generative artificial intelligence (AI) models for a variety of purposes.'
Let me close this post with what I wrote a year ago.
'Let me remind you of the mission statement for LinkedIn. “The mission of LinkedIn is simple: connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” Is the definition of 'productive and successful' a gigantic amount of regurgitated, useless content or less [thoughtful] original ideas?'
I still don't see how deploying AI and training it on my content without my permission makes me 'more successful.’ The only recurrent pattern at LinkedIn so far is innovation malaise.
PS: Users can opt out of AI training by navigating to the "data privacy" section in their account settings, then turning off the option allowing collection of "data for generative AI improvement."