A love letter to LinkedIn’s AI influencers - What happened to your voice?

I clap for those who are brave enough to show their face and post on LinkedIn about topics they specialise in. I will light myself on fire though the next time I see a "thought leader" who outsourced everything to AI, including their "thinking".

There is not much that I despise but sometimes... seeing an AI influencer that once figured out that they can fully outsource their copywriting for ChatGPT and now post the most over-generalised and shallow industry "insights" on LinkedIn. These are the people that get me GOING. They talk about how disruptive AI will be and how it's going to change everything, but no matter how many times you reread their post, you can’t find the part where something meaningful was said.

It’s basically the headline said in 10 different ways. Zero value provided, just your typical over-generalised AI yapping. Every once in awhile you are faced with the final boss of all ChatGPT text and can play bingo with how many “in today’s fast-paced world”, three-point sentences or those — damn hyphens — you spot. The ultimate bingo win is when you hear them at the company afterworks later on say: “Why do you write your own copy, just use AI bro.”

It's like talking to an NPC: No soul whatsoever.

At some point during this influencer's new career as a thought leader they forgot that the majority who read their texts can tell it's AI. This is when things gets uncomfortable for everybody, because if the point was to sound smart and gain the readers' trust...the opposite is now happening.

What happened to your own voice?

On another note, could say that the adaptation of generative AI has been good. OpenAI's ChatGPT has 800M active weekly users and it’s not uncommon to actually hear the "just use AI" in a daily conversation. This, however, does not mean that our prompts and therefore, the outputs, are automatically good. A beautifully human feature called critical thinking comes to play when choosing between copy-pasting AI text and posting, or editing that text a little bit to make it sound more like you. I encourage to explore what your own writing style is and learning to prompt in a way that adds to that. Your knowledge is valuable and your creativity is what makes you interesting.

AI knows what you know but it cannot put it into words in the same way as you can.

AI as a writing aid is still amazing. But as we move towards the (fast-paced ;) world where prompting is often very simple and the outputs match that same simplicity with over-general answers, we lose the part that makes social media interesting; Hearing different voices that talk or teach about things that people genuinely know or have learned throughout the years. I wonder if that influencer posting even fully reads their own text before going in to their girlfriend telling that they are an AI thought leader. The text is just...shallow.

Now, this comes from someone who writes technical texts with AI. For us mere mortals, non-industry experts who have to use AI to write about some topics, we need to understand that ChatGPT’s text has its own personality and people can often tell when it has been used. Remove its characteristics. Replace them with what you would say. Make sure that the reader hears the brand’s tone of voice instead of the generic, uncanny (silicon) valley voice.

And by the way, there is a place for all AI-generated blog posts etc. when the goal is simply to punch the reader in the face with some industry knowledge and facts. But for the thought leaders who want to give truly valuable industry insights and gain their readers’ trust…just write the text yourself. We want to hear YOU, not AI.

S