Your next LinkedIn commenter could be an AI bot

On Thursday evening, I received a LinkedIn comment from someone who doesn’t exist.

“Jacob Hill”, nominally based in Sydney, Australia, responded to a post I made about a recent business trip to Canberra.

“What a great idea!” he said. “Look forward to read your report about the small business sector!”

You can read the report, if you like.

But I am unsure Hill can, at least not in the way you or I would, as Hill appears to be the synthetic product of a company called Engage AI.

“I’m your personal AI on LinkedIn and I empower introverts, SMB owners, and enterprise BMDs to nurture and build relationships on LinkedIn,” the profile states.

“I envision myself to become your AI sidekick that retains memory from past interactions to augment conversation in virtual (and IRL) one day.”

A link on Hill’s profile directs to the web page of Engage AI, which claims to have revolutionised LinkedIn posting through its new browser plugin.

Its website contains a tenuous mention of OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, but shies away from a full description of its technical underpinnings.

Regardless, a video shows the tool in action, auto-filling a comment in response to LinkedIn god-king Gary Vaynerchuk.

“Say goodbye to generic comments like ‘Good post!’, ‘Thanks for sharing’ and ‘Love your content!’”, the Engage AI LinkedIn profile states.

Whether Hill’s own comment — “What a great idea!” — breaks free of that paradigm is up for debate.

There are other signs of artificiality, if you know where to look.

A reverse image search of Hill’s artfully banal profile picture matched results from a discomfiting site called generated.photos, which does exactly what you’d expect.

Then there is Hill’s written output, which does a good job of emulating anodyne corporate-speak — until Hill refers to himself. Or itself. Or themselves.

Describing the need for an AI-powered tool for generating LinkedIn posts, Hill said: “We are not much of a people person.”

Well, neither am we.

Hill continued:

I feel nervous to comment and I’m afraid to look silly with my comment.

Especially on the professional social network like LinkedIn.

What if my colleagues think I’m an idiot because of my comments?

My coworkers never needed to see my LinkedIn comments to make that conclusion.

But, as I have written before, human expression is inherently more interesting than algorithmically-generated output.

Surely the same must be true for LinkedIn comments, which may be one of the least artful means of communication we’ve ever devised.

In any case, it feels like the emergence of profiles like Jacob’s heralds a turning point for corporate communication.

If we’ve trained ourselves to talk like robots, it stands to reason they’d eventually try to do it for us.

SmartCompany has reached out to Engage AI to discuss the matter further. With any luck, we may hear from a real-life human.