Over the past months, some of my LinkedIn posts went kind of “viral”. One thing I was able to observe are AI replies. Whether automated or not, this kind of alarms me. Today I went so far as to remove and unfollow a connection that send me an AI written article. For one, I’m not quite sure how many users can actually recognize AI written content. Second, I’m quite sure that most user’s don’t yet understand the consequences of this happening.
To understand this, you first need to realize that AI is now doubling in capability roughly every six months – or faster. For a while now, humans are using AI to write social posts or comments – purely for engagement. I learned that there is increasingly little to none original thought in a post, comment (even in personal messages and emails).
But now, AI became agentic. On X, Instagram, Facebook you can use APIs to engage in conversations, to share content, respond to comments. Some of the fastest growing and most polarizing accounts hook up AI systems to run their social accounts. What looks like a human in the first sight, is actually a AI system.
The problem, I see, is much less about AI itself, but human beings ending up interacting emotionally with these AI bots. If someone is liking your post or leaving a comment, and you don’t realize this is an AI interaction, then you end up believing that you just had real influence, started a real conversation, made real progress – when in reality, you are just wasting your emotional energy interacting with a soulless bot.
The more this happens – and the phenomenon is clearly increasing – the more we humans step into a trap. We read soulless content, get fooled by soulless comments, and automated likes.
In a sense, we are right now on a path towards a “dead internet”. AI bots write for other AI bots, algorithms rank content for other algorithms. What is the role of us humans? We become mere spectators. Or much worse: batteries who are providing an emotional charge.
What is already happening – and I feel the pressure myself sometimes – is that we humans will try to “compete” with the volume and perfection of AI. We start mimicking them (especially when we believe AI agents to be genuinely human). We become less human as a result – because if we don’t pay attention, we will need to survive in a system designed by machines for machines first, and humans second.
The most important thing you have to realize is that metrics are obsolete, worthless currency. Increasingly, engagement, reach, follower-count will be from soulless AI bots.
What can we do?
Our actions matter more than anything else. Whether you use AI to write, allow your marketing department to automate with AI, whether you accept AI slop in your feed, whether you buy from soulless businesses doing soulless AI marketing. We need to starve the AI engagement. If it feels AI, don’t engage. If it is clearly AI (or worse AI automated) remove the connection, consider blocking.
Most importantly, start valuing real human conversations over anything that is happening online. 10 real conversations with human souls are better than 100,000 impressions.
Finally, be the human. If you aren’t writing it, don’t post it.
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