[HN Gopher] LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train th...
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LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool
Author : lopkeny12ko
Score : 121 points
Date : 2024-09-18 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| AthJa wrote:
| I'm so glad I left linkedin years ago and never went back.
| tomkat0789 wrote:
| the new way all these online services suck
| baal80spam wrote:
| EU here, I don't have this option in Settings.
| seqizz wrote:
| Yeah same, I am so sad about the things we miss here because of
| GDPR.
| eterm wrote:
| UK here, and I do have that setting.
|
| Despite the UK still having the data protection act.
| krick wrote:
| Me too, but I wonder if it's actually a GDPR perk or maybe some
| regional A/B kind of thing. Or whatever. I mean, I am not sure
| if it's a good news or a bad news.
| velokick wrote:
| garbage in garbage out
| hprotagonist wrote:
| shame nobody scraped them years ago! ... oh, wait.
| fidotron wrote:
| Because if there's one thing the world needs more of it's
| LinkedIn feed spam.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Joke's on them because I use AI to generate LI content.
| Hamuko wrote:
| LinkedIn content only had a thin veneer of humanity before the
| onslaught of LLMs anyways.
| minkles wrote:
| Humanity is pushing it. There are some serious lunatics on
| there.
| nicbou wrote:
| Joke's on them because my LinkedIn content is devoid of
| intelligence
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| An actual article: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/18/linkedin-
| scraped-user-data...
|
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41582951)
| kklisura wrote:
| From one of the tweets in the thread:
|
| > LinkedIn seems to have auto enrolled folks in the US, but
| hearing from folks in the EU that they are not seeing this listed
| in their settings (likely due to privacy regulations).
|
| Honestly, GDPR looks like a godsend! It came just at the right
| time!
| siva7 wrote:
| Somehow i feel sad for this AI model. All the others are trained
| on authentic content and this boy gets socialised on the most
| shallow content imaginable. Poor, socially awkward AI.
| throwanem wrote:
| Are you kidding? If any model ever makes the x-risk folks'
| nightmares come true, it'll be this one.
| btown wrote:
| Vedal987 should work with LinkedIn to get access to this
| data, fine-tune Evil Neuro on LinkedIn posts, then have her
| read through business school case studies and offer advice.
|
| It would be content so unhinged, it would remove the need for
| management consulting as an industry - companies could simply
| type their problems in chat and do the exact opposite of what
| Evil LinkedIn Neuro suggests!
|
| (for the uninitiated: https://www.youtube.com/@Neurosama &
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-sama)
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Why on earth would you train AI on _that_? In the social media
| world it 's already the closest thing resembling boring,
| unreadable machine generated content.
|
| No matter what you ask it, it'll brag about what a great job
| it's doing answering you, announce that it's having a baby,
| then tell everybody that it's being let go because there are
| better AI. It'll thank a few key people who it worked with, and
| tell you that it's actually thrilled with this opportunity to
| take a break from answering your question, and will spend more
| time on its old hobby of being an online resume.
| theiz wrote:
| Because there is a huge market for resume builders and career
| guidance where AI can play a role. Using LinkedIn you can
| measure success and network performance and correlate that to
| the resume and posted content.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I'm guessing the real money linked in wants is in the
| hiring and firing, B2B. Now, every resume gets answered and
| your first interaction with a company is a poorly scripted
| AI who goes from manic enthusiasm to depressingly rote in
| the actual job requirements and probably will still ghost
| you and continue the imbalance of application effort vs
| employer response.
|
| The converse will be true, but the price of AI will just
| make poor people have to suffer even more
|
| Just the long march of wealth inequality and it's time
| sucking capitalism.
| Propelloni wrote:
| That made me laugh. Thank you.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| The /r/LinkedInLunatics/ subreddit is going to get swamped with
| all the new content this monster generates.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > Somehow i feel sad for this AI model.
|
| it will be the first AI CEO.
| m463 wrote:
| When you said this somehow I thought of training an art ai on
| the giant state sponsored monuments of the world.
|
| On linkedin your next resume will have the impact of mount
| rushmore, sitting lincoln or a soviet era workers monument.
| (The thinker will be censored out because of nudity) :)
| ABraidotti wrote:
| The Corporate Memphis of AI models.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Mmmm authentic doesn't mean good or positive or rational.
|
| So, what were you trying to say?
| wnc3141 wrote:
| LinkedIn strikes me as the adult equivalent of self conscious
| school kids trying to hold a conversation among themselves,
| each self consciously trying to sound cool.
| will-burner wrote:
| An LLM trained on LinkedIn posts would be good for comedic
| purposes if nothing else. It's unintentional comedy score would
| be extremely high. Would love to see a conversation between an
| LLM trained on LinkedIn posts and an LLM trained on X/Twitter
| posts.
| lordnacho wrote:
| LinkedIn is an business card / CV storage site, where you can
| find a job.
|
| If it was just a bunch of linked profiles with a job matching
| function, it would still be LinkedIn.
|
| But of course, you can't work at a place that does something that
| mundane without suggesting something that makes you look like
| Facebook or Twitter. You have to at least give people some sort
| of reason to see what their old colleagues are up to.
|
| Nobody really wants to read the LinkedIn feed, so it's perfectly
| acceptable that it gets flooded with AI generated content. In
| effect, the content on LinkedIn is that picture of a happy family
| on your insurance brochure. You can't not have a photo of
| something on that kind of marketing document, and you can't be a
| social network without some sort of doom-scrollable content.
|
| This is just a cheap way to generate some wallpaper.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| >Nobody really wants to read the LinkedIn feed,
|
| I mean, not _nobody._ I follow a lot of people that post very
| thoughtful things that spark discussion, and it 's one of the
| only places I know of other than here where I can discuss
| topics related to my career or field with peers, and for me
| that's useful.
| janalsncm wrote:
| It really make me think. If LI was _just_ business profile,
| jobs board, and chat with recruiters, how much engineering
| would they need? I'm not saying to go Twitter mode and fire
| everybody, but certainly much less than now. So for that extra
| revenue from the feed, a lot of it will be eaten up by salaries
| for extra engineers. All of the extra work is going towards
| something largely viewed as useless.
|
| Zooming out, I bet a lot of the economy is like this. In LI's
| case literally some of the smartest people, people with PhDs
| who were maybe even born in another country, thinking for 40
| hours a week about how to rank one piece of meaningless drivel
| above another one. This is instead of solving real, tangible
| problems that everyone can see. Ok maybe those people will pay
| taxes and end up contributing to something like education
| because they have to, but it's a pretty inefficient way of
| making the world better.
| wmeredith wrote:
| You should check this out:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I should read this. I really struggle with doing work which
| falls into this category. It's bad for me, and even worse
| it strikes me as seriously problematic to society. I don't
| want to earn money for nothing, even if most people
| involved feel as though that in itself is worthwhile. It
| has been a fairly significant factor in any struggle I've
| had finding work. I have to ask myself, is this a bullshit
| job? The answer is often yes.
|
| I've recently remedied this to a degree by lowering salary
| expectations and looking in fields with a more scientific
| and practical basis in the products and outputs.
| Unfortunately I'm not a scientist, only a programmer, so my
| utility is seriously limited and finding work is quite a
| bit harder than if I were to stick within the SV startup
| scene.
| coding123 wrote:
| While I don't disagree with the notion of the existence of
| BS jobs, UBI is not needed. Instead we need more companies
| to take on more and more interesting and world-solving
| things.
|
| We keep saying we need UBI but at the same time "we don't
| have enough homes". Then instead of UBI, maybe people
| should "make homes"? (That's just one example - there are
| also jobs in food, healthcare, mental illness care,
| spacecraft, etc...
| daedrdev wrote:
| And you should consider that it's probably junk. From the
| article: A 2021 study empirically tested
| several of Graeber's claims, such as that bullshit jobs
| were increasing over time and that they accounted for much
| of the workforce. Using data from the EU-conducted European
| Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and
| declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to
| be "rarely" or "never" useful.
|
| Many jobs that appear bad are actually needed, often only
| because of regulatory requirements or because their
| importance is misunderstood.
| rdhyee wrote:
| I can get to that setting (when logged in) at
| https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/settings/data-for-a...
| telesilla wrote:
| This tells me that the page does not exist (apparently because
| I'm in a GDPR region that doesn't allow this behavior from
| LinkedIn, I understand now from reading this thread).
| grecy wrote:
| I'm currently sitting in a GDPR region, though just visiting.
|
| The setting is visible and settable for me (it was ON, now
| it's OFF)
| Animats wrote:
| By "everyone", they mean LinkedIn customers, correct? Or is
| LinkedIn scraping the Web now?
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| This is your kindly reminder that if you're not the customer,
| then you are the product, with an added caveat that, when it
| comes to social networks, you are always the product.
|
| I say that as a happy product, uhh, user of every social network
| out there.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| LinkedIn actually has a lot of customers. I know many are free
| users, but it's not like Facebook where the vast majority
| aren't paying anything.
| altdataseller wrote:
| If you're not paying, you're the product.
|
| If you're paying, you're also the product.
| joshdavham wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that you can be both 'the product'
| and a customer at the same time.
| paxys wrote:
| A bot trained on LinkedIn content. Good God.
| qintl55 wrote:
| i just hate that they turned it on by default
| yumraj wrote:
| ThoughtLeader AI
|
| /s
| pluc wrote:
| I'm curious to hear from anyone who actually pays for LinkedIn,
| did they fuck you over too?
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Yup.
| coding123 wrote:
| Someone filled in https://www.linkedin.com/not-applicable today
| on their job app, and I have to admit, that was clever. I don't
| personally like that we make that field required.
| joshdavham wrote:
| It might be cool if we eventually got some sort of a LinkedIn co-
| pilot to help with applying for jobs, but then again, who knows
| peppertree wrote:
| AI is about to learn what a tragic car accident can teach them
| about leadership and drop shipping.
| bagels wrote:
| I can't wait to read more stories like that. Inspirational.
| croes wrote:
| What did they expect from a Microsoft company?
| jumploops wrote:
| This will be interesting.
|
| Because with a dataset like this...
|
| ...all the content will be below the imaginary "read more" fold!
| koolala wrote:
| Make money. Build chips. Eat electricity.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| I wouldn't have ever thought that LinkedIn feed content was
| written by real people if I hadn't met some of them in real life.
|
| It's a low enough bar that I think AI content will fit right in.
| elawler24 wrote:
| I met one of the PMs building this. She was working on NL unified
| search for the feed. I noticed it's gotten way better in the last
| few weeks. Instead of using Google to search [first name][last
| name]["linkedin"], now i can reliably type my query into
| LinkedIn's search bar and get the correct result. I'm a fan.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> I recommend opting out now_
|
| Little point. It'll be like facebook's opt-out and only cover
| things you post/update going forward. Everything you've already
| posted has already been slurped into the training set and won't
| be taken out and the model(s) retrained.
|
| The only way to show disapproval in this sort of behaviour that
| they'll feel is to stop using services that use auto-opt-in for
| anything, and not enough people are likely to do that for it to
| be effective.
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(page generated 2024-09-18 23:00 UTC)