Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

Note: This was originally published as a LinkedIn post on November 11, 2025.

I need to make a painful confession: somehow, LinkedIn has become an important social network to me. This isn’t necessarily due to LinkedIn’s sparkling competence, of course. To the contrary, LinkedIn is the Gerald Ford of social networks: the normal one that was left standing as the Richard Nixons and the Spiro Agnews of social media imploded around them. As with Gerald Ford, with LinkedIn we know that we’re getting something a bit clumsy and boring, but (as with post-Watergate America!), we’re also getting something that isn’t totally crooked — and that’s actually a bit of a relief.

But because I am finding I am spending more time here, we need to have some real talk: too many of you are using LLMs to generate content. Now, this isn’t entirely your fault: as if LLMs weren’t tempting enough, LinkedIn itself is cheerfully (insistently!) offering to help you "rewrite it with AI." It seems so excited to help you out, why not let it chip in and ease your own burden?

Because holy hell, the writing sucks. It’s not that it’s mediocre (though certainly that!), it’s that it is so stylistically grating, riddled with emojis and single-sentence paragraphs and "it’s not just…​ but also" constructions and (yes!) em-dashes that some of us use naturally — but most don’t (or shouldn’t).

When you use an LLM to author a post, you may think you are generating plausible writing, but you aren’t: to anyone who has seen even a modicum of LLM-generated content (a rapidly expanding demographic!), the LLM tells are impossible to ignore. Bluntly, your intellectual fly is open: lots of people notice — but no one is pointing it out. And the problem isn’t merely embarrassment: when you — person whose perspective I want to hear! — are obviously using an LLM to write posts for you, I don’t know what’s real and what is in fact generated fanfic. You definitely don’t sound like you, so…​ is the actual content real? I mean, maybe? But also maybe not. Regardless, I stop reading — and so do lots of others.

To be clear, I think LLMs are incredibly useful: they are helpful for brainstorming, invaluable for comprehending text, and they make for astonishingly good editors. (And, unlike most good editors, you can freely ignore their well-meaning suggestions without fear of igniting a civil war over the Oxford comma or whatever.) But LLMs are also lousy writers and (most importantly!) they are not you. At best, they will wrap your otherwise real content in constructs that cause people to skim or otherwise stop reading; at worst, they will cause people who see it for what it is to question your authenticity entirely.

So please, if not for the sanity of all of us than just to give your own message the credit it deserves: have some confidence in your own voice — and write your own content.