I’m a journalist, and the first 30 minutes of my day used to be spent mainlining newsfeeds. Now, more often than not, it’s dedicated to LinkedIn.
Such is the natural course of technology; I seek an engaged audience for pieces built on considered thought. And I discovered the pseudo social network that I’d once found cringe is actually full of smart people—who crop up if I’m willing to spend a bit of extra time sharing my writing with them.
We are now in the era of the AI-born LinkedIn expert. Their mastery is dropping a story into ChatGPT and asking for a perky LinkedIn post summarizing it. (LinkedIn even has its own AI writing assistant that encourages people to “Rewrite with AI” to serve up this slop.) They snatch the thoughts and research of others, reconstitute it, and present it as their own. Even when they source a link, the new work is still oddly pre-chewed. A steak transformed into mechanically processed meat.
But honestly, it’s not the plagiarism lite that gets to me most. And LinkedIn is hardly the only spot you’ll find people publishing AI-drafted copy. Beyond the Great Truncation at the heart of Zoom meeting summaries, I can tell the pitch emails I receive are increasingly written with the help of AI, while companies like Microsoft promote Copilot to help write corporate memos (and LinkedIn posts!). It seems every designer I know is using AI to write about their projects, and Canva just unveiled tools to batch write ads for you in about every language on earth.
This is all *fine* [the room around me beginning to smoke but not in full flames yet]. Not every pitch deck needs to be a Shakespearean sonnet. Even language specialists will tell you that a lot of writing is formulaic, which is a reason why predictive autocomplete technologies have been so accurate for so long.
I used to fear that AI would trap each of us into our own universe. Now I’m imagining a future that’s far more mundane. It’s one where I use AI to write you a thing. Then you have your AI summarize it. Then you have your AI write back. And then my AI summarizes it. Why wasn’t it all just summarized in the first place? Does anyone need to have a full thought ever again?
Don’t take me as some Luddite denying the current impact or supreme possibilities lurking inside generative AI. We consolidated all our knowledge into the internet, which we used to train humanity’s synthesizer. Life is gonna be messy for a while. But I’m not just a curmudgeonly old writer who is threatened by a machine that can pump out copy even faster than I can. (And ask my editors; I’m lightning.)
What is so insulting to me about those AI-written messages is that they take less time and consideration to produce than they do to consume. You are, by the nature of sharing these automated words, signaling to me that you care less about my time and attention than you do your own. Of course you’re free to believe that as much as you like—in your own head. Just don’t drop it into my inbox or feed. Because that’s rude.
In a way, an AI-generated image or advertisement is less offensive to me, because we look at most digital ads for a second or less (with a mere 4% commanding our attention for a full two). To everyone in marketing and graphic design, please do not cancel your weekend plans to get 10 additional microseconds of my engagement! Who cares? (Apologies, I really do enjoy a great ad.)
Reading simply takes longer than visual processing. It inherently asks more of an audience. Presenting a friend or colleague with a note an AI wrote is like inviting them over for dinner and microwaving a Stouffer’s. An AI post on LinkedIn is bringing that same microwaved dinner to a potluck. You should be embarrassed in either case! Not by your lack of skill or practice in putting together words, but your lack of respect for not even trying.
Now, in full fairness, I will acknowledge that this faux pas is not all your fault. The omnipresent do-anything button of AI is certainly tempting. And companies including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are encouraging such behavior while hoping to prove out their investment in AI tools. They will addict us to automation even when it’s uncouth because there’s no business plan in the world built on moderation.
The truth, however, is if something isn’t worth you writing it, there’s about no way in hell it’s worth me reading it.