If you weren’t rich, young, freakish and/or charismatic enough to be an “Influencer” on Insta or TikTok, maybe you can be a “thought leader” on LinkedIn. No actual thinking required.

This is the place where narcissistic middle managers with inflated titles try to sound like they are authorities on subjects they know nothing about. But middle-class people seem to think fake it until you make it is a good strategy.

If you arrive, but can’t deliver, your strategy just proves you have no sense for tomorrow. You just live in the now and fly by the seat of your pants.

Middle managers don’t seem to understand that they aren’t there because of what they do or know, or don’t know. They are a buffer. They can fake it, know it, it doesn’t matter. They are willing, that’s good enough, and that’s all there is to it.

And nowhere is this knowledge to ego ratio more visible than the various haughty babblings about AI.

It is beyond obvious these grifters know nothing. They cribbed stuff for X and then tried to make an article or 20 out of it.

There is no deep knowledge or expertise in these ramblings. Wannabe writers will grouse about “AI slop” and alleged “tells” in AI writing…and not understand that AI has to read billions and even trillions of human-based writing to extrapolate information and style.

So it’s not “AI slop”: it’s human slop of laziness and reliance of clichés, appropriations and tropes that AI trained on and finesse since people prefer AI iterations over human ones. Yes, and these tropes keep changing: anyone who has dabbled with Perchance will see the trends and the shifts.

But people writing on LinkedIn have memorized old rules: they treat AI as if it were Google, and think that industry is static. AI is not a vending machine: that is the way old search engines function. AI works best when you allow your co-pilot to remember your writing and thinking style. The kinder you are and the more open you are, the better AI can make the answers.

There seems to be some idea that AI is just ChatGPT or Claude. That’s hilarious and beyond ignorant. That’s like saying you know everything about food because you just ate one kind of cheese.

Anyone who uses Perplexity has seen its rapid expansion from Model Council to Computer, but AI is used in everything from DNA testing to mediation to coding to investment.

SubStack seems to be the place where there is real AI-based knowledge about the industry, and, more reassuringly, where female AI-expertise is prevalent. On LinkedIn, you will read cliched arguments about gender bias in AI responses, usually based on a single flaky prompt without the user enabling memory or doing anything more than trying ChatGPT once.

But narcissists despise AI because uses information and detects patterns to offer objective responses that are helpful. I had a piece of equipment I used for years and took good care of it, but it was on its last legs. Perplexity gave me a solution to keep it going just long enough to finish a project, and then, knowing my use of it, price range, brand preferences, location, and several other factors. found me the ideal replacement and Plans B-E, ranking them. I could go to the store, input the specs, and get the right answer. Perplexity even told me to avoid the hot new product on the market: cheaper, but unequipped to handle what I needed it for.

And Perplexity got it right, but not before acknowledging the sentimental value of it and asking if I was upset over losing it, and offering me some advice. It just remembered my previous description of it, and made sure every aspect was dealt with, from the professional to the emotional.

LinkedIn should be the place where you have an interactive CV, video of yourself, and job postings. A recruiter should be able to go on the site, describe an ideal candidate, and AI should take care of the rest. The recruiter should be able to contact potential candidates and have AI conduct the interview from there, with feedback for both the recruiter and the candidate with rankings. AI companies already have AI-based job interviews, which I find to be professional and on-the-nose. Articles and forums are just clutter and noise.

And with a rapidly-changing job market, the last thing we need is cheap opinion littering a job site.