Flasz On Film

One of the many minor displeasures and daily inconveniences associated with having to navigate the world of mass layoffs and unemployment is the need to use LinkedIn on a daily basis. In fact, you might be inclined to surmise that there are two types of people you will encounter there: those like me who wish they could spend their time elsewhere and those who choose to log on, post stuff, like and comment, etc. And the stuff you get to see there—which you only encounter because you’re there to look for jobs to apply to—is just something else.

Interacting with this social medium is my idea of hell. Fake job ads reposted ad infinitum by companies that are either looking for a perfect unicorn hire and don’t mind waiting for nine months to find them, or companies that are not hiring at all but want to maintain a growth stance to trick the market and their investors. Humble braggers posting about their professional achievements as though it was nothing, expecting kudos secretly. Not-so-humble braggers announcing to the world that they completed a fifteen-minute course on change management and that now they have the necessary credentials to post motivational cringe on LinkedIn. Professional spectators clapping and whooping in the comments whenever anyone from their network shitposts for attention, all in pursuit of increasing their own engagement. Reframers and other wannabe gurus posting about how their recent trip to the shops can be a lesson in nurturing leadership traits. For as long as I remember, LinkedIn has been a cringe incubator and Facebook for people without hobbies.

But that’s not even the half of it because ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT for the general public, LinkedIn has quickly devolved into a veritable conveyor belt of unbearable slop, perhaps even eclipsing the troll factory that Twitter has turned into ever since god-emperor Elon purchased it for his own billionaire amusement. It’s just an infinite toilet roll of pseudo-motivational posts all bearing the unmistakable LLM fingerprints. “It’s not X, it’s Y.” Two punchy sentences followed by a exactly three bullet points. “Here’s the uncomfortable truth.” And those pesky em dashes used instead of commas and colons.

But that’s not really why I’m here because moaning about LinkedIn being a cesspool of cringe content is hardly original. It’s undeniable that the invention of GPT-powered chatbots versed in text generation was a godsend to millions of frustrated motivational gurus who always wanted to write a groundbreaking self-help book and become the next Mark Manson and the only hindrance prohibiting them from achieving their dream was that annoying requirement to actually write something. It’s much like audiobooks and summarizing apps have freed the general public from the burden of having to read anything (though I believe there might be a bit more nuanced to this phenomenon which I discussed separately in recent months). I can only weep at the fact that countless millions of adults the world over—many of whom displaying snazzy titles in their bios and holding professional positions of import and influence—treat both reading and writing as though they were a necessary punishment one needed to incur in pursuit, respectively, of extracting information from text and codifying information in text. Some would call it the epitome of utilitarianism, while all I can see is a wholesale failure of education as a fundamental concept.

As someone who derives incredible accomplishment and enjoyment from both reading and writing, I find this situation troubling and detestable and it’s not necessarily because of how widespread and accepted this phenomenon of treating what I love like a necessary evil to be managed while chasing success and not a passion to pursue for its own intrinsic merits is, but because of how comprehensively the market seems to reward what essentially is weaponized laziness. Moreover—and this is the actual reason that spurred me to sit down to type whatever this is—even the idea of prompting an LLM is beginning to be seen as an exercise in tedium that needs to be further simplified, automated, outsourced or totally abolished. I have come across not one, not two, but three separate cringe posts on LinkedIn where three unrelated people/startups/entities advertised their solution to conveyor belt cringe slop that LinkedIn is completely overflowing with. And the solution is… a different AI tool.

Imagine being so overwhelmed that even prompting an LLM is too much of an ask and therefore you need an app that would transcribe your voice notes and compose posts in your style. Built to listen to your speech and recognize your personal quirks—which sounds like surveillance to me, by the way—an app can transcribe your braindead cringe ideas into slop that looks different from the slop you’ve been seeing on LinkedIn all day. Perfect camouflage to reframe garbage posts about growth mindset as different flavour of garbage served with gourmet bin juice.

I immediately imagined Sharon, a fifty-something VP of marketing at a Fortune 500 company who feels she needs to build and maintain her brand as a professional influencer to stay relevant and silence her own inner critic, and in order to stand out from the sea of unreadable sludge she chooses to employ an AI tool to sharpen up her AI-generated cringe prompted in between meetings. Using three apps is way simpler than sitting down to write eighty words authentically, it seems. With her own fingers. I have nothing but contempt for an impostor who would use a string of tools to roll their prompted turd writing in sprinkles sold as genuine insight and I have even greater disdain for the market that rewards them for it with social capital and mounds of kudos.

I weep for humanity. Not because LLMs are coming for me and because my work will become obsolete. Mine won’t, I can assure you of that. Sooner than you think, reading an article written start-to-finish by a human and containing their half-baked human opinions will be a rarity. And my only worry is not that I will cease my operations or that others like me will hand in their badges and guns. I worry that nobody will be able to find it because the market doesn’t reward it. Instead, it gives out gold stars to people who use apps to disguise their slop as new kind of slop because they fear the idea of writing like vampires fear garlic while calling themselves authors and thinkers.