AI-generated writing is now on the Internet. Introducing automated prose can sometimes change the character of a website, such as when once-loved publications are purchased and updated to become AI content factories. Other times, however, it’s harder to argue that AI actually changed anything. For example, look at LinkedIn.
The Microsoft-owned social networking site for business professionals has embraced AI, even offering LinkedIn Premium subscribers access to its own in-house AI writing tools that can “rewrite” posts, profiles and direct messages. The initiative appears to be working: More than 54 percent of the longest English-language posts on LinkedIn are likely generated by AI, according to a new analysis shared exclusively with WIRED by AI detection startup Originality AI. The thing is that the corporate style of AI writing on the platform can be difficult to distinguish from the genuine human-written style. Thought Leader Blogs.
Originality scanned a sample of 8,795 public LinkedIn posts of more than 100 words that were published between January 2018 and October 2024. For the first few years, the use of AI writing tools on LinkedIn was negligible. Then came a major surge in early 2023. “The spike came when ChatGPT came out,” says Originality CEO Jon Gillham. At that time, Originality found that the number of posts likely generated by AI had increased by 189 percent; it has since stabilized.
LinkedIn says it does not track how many posts on the site are written or edited with artificial intelligence tools. “But we have strong defenses in place to proactively identify low-quality exact or near-exact duplicate content. When we detect such content, we take steps to ensure it is not widely promoted,” says Adam Walkiewicz, head of “feed relevance” at LinkedIn. “We see AI as a tool that can help with revising a draft or overcoming the blank page problem, but what matters are the original thoughts and ideas our members share.”
LinkedIn is for finding a new job and keeping in touch with old coworkers, which means it’s a relatively serious social media platform. But in recent years it has developed its own network of influential peopleforks surprisingly popular with Generation Z, including teenagers. Like everywhere else on the Internet, people are also hungry for attention on LinkedIn and startups have realized that there is money to be made by helping people grow their audience. There is an AI cottage industry LinkedIn comment and postgenerators to help career-minded people produce content to dazzle potential bosses or potential clients. Instead of spending four minutes thinking about the right tone with which to congratulate a former colleague on their promotion, it now takes four seconds to conjure up an algorithmically generated compliment.
But LinkedIn users who spoke to WIRED say they rely more on large, general-purpose language models to cobble together their LinkedIn posts rather than worrying about special AI tools. Content writer Adetayo Sogbesan says she uses Anthropic’s Claude to draft posts she creates on behalf of tech industry clients. “Of course, there are a lot of edits afterwards,” he says, but the chatbot still “helps me save a lot of time.”