Has your ‘AI radar’ ever gone off when scrolling through your LinkedIn feed? As it turns out, it should have been, with a new study finding that 54% of long-form posts on LinkedIn are likely AI-generated, as of October 2024.
The main culprit behind this phenomenon? ChatGPT. Originality AI’s research found that AI posts on LinkedIn shot up 189% after ChatGPT was launched at the end of 2022, and that the chatbot remained a staple in post-generation ever since.
From enabling users to churn out longer posts, to assisting with proofreading tasks, AI is proving to be a useful right-hand man for LinkedIn users. However, with the pendulum officially swinging on AI-generated content, what might the rise of the technology mean for the future of platforms like LinkedIn?
Most of the Posts you See on LinkedIn Are AI-Generated
LinkedIn is the platform of choice for job seekers, networkers, and of course, the odd professional peacocker. However, a new study by the AI plagiarism and fact-checking site Originality AI has found that it is also a hotbed for AI-generated content – with an estimated 54% of English language posts being generated by generative AI tools.
This just in! View
the top business tech deals for 2024 👨💻
LinkedIn’s AI-powered toolkit, which was released to Premium users in November 2023, has undoubtedly contributed to this steady uptick. However, the study – which spanned content published over an 82-month period from January 2018 to October 2024 – found that OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT opened the floodgates for AI on the platform, with AI-generated posts on the site surging by 189% shortly after it was launched. For comparison, AI was only being used to produce around 5-10% of LinkedIn posts before this period.
While the market is currently packed to the rafters with useful AI chatbots, the release of ChatGPT marked a game-changing breakthrough for generative AI. Within its first few months of going public, the app attracted 100 million users, resulting in a wave of AI content being generated online, with republications being felt everywhere from the e-book market to review sites like Capterra.
While the use of ChatGPT has since plateaued, the technology has completely transformed how users create content on the platform. But with generative AI offering so many useful applications, how exactly are LinkedIn users using these tools to write posts?
How Are People Using AI On LinkedIn?
Generative AI helps users create large bodies of text easily and in a few clicks. So, it should come as little surprise that a common reason professionals are using tools like ChatGPT is to increase the word count of their LinkedIn posts.
Originality AI found that since ChatGPT became publicly available the length of LinkedIn posts has increased significantly. Specifically, the word count of posts surged by 107% within the first few months of its release, with the length of posts increasing further in recent years.
Generative AI also lets fire off posts in a couple of seconds, making it significantly more time-efficient than writing a post from scratch. This can be particularly useful for those getting paid to write posts on behalf of other professionals. For example, when speaking to WIRED, content writer Adetayo Sogbesan explains that Anthropic’s Claude is a game-changer when it comes to creating rough posts for clients in the tech industry. “Of course, there’s a lot of editing done after,” she says, but the chatbot still “helps me save a lot of time” she tells WIRED.
Generative AI has also proven to be a useful tool for non-native English speakers, with journalists and marketer Çiğdem Öztabak telling WIRED that he uses chatbots to improve the accuracy of translation and fix grammatical errors.
Using AI To Create Content Remains Controversial
Despite chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini becoming workplace staples, the rise of AI-generated content remains a contentious issue for many.
For one, chatbot makers continue to attract ire for ‘web scraping’ – a controversial practice that involves them accessing huge amounts of data from multiple sources on the internet. Top publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have struck back against companies like OpenAI for taking their intellectual property without content, sparking debates around the ethical and legal implications of generative AI.
A lot of users are also concerned that the quality of content on LinkedIn will suffer as a result of the AI boom. Using generative AI to churn out high volumes of posts will indubitably lead to a proliferation of jargon-filled, poorly written content on the site. While this isn’t too much of a stark difference from the LinkedIn posts made before ChatGPT, it doesn’t do anything to help the platform’s reputation of being overly corporate and inauthentic.
All this to say, the nature of LinkedIn’s user-generated content has changed irreversibly as a result of AI. And while there is still a place for deploying AI tools when crafting or refining content, relying on these tools too heavy-handedly may make it harder for readers to emotionally connect to your posts at all.