Shell Game<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\nKyle took on the CEO role at our entirely AI-staffed company. (Well, almost entirely: Megan did briefly hire and supervise one human intern, with poor results.) Starting out with only a few lines of prompt, he evolved into the kind of rise-and-grind hustler who nonetheless lacked basic competence at many duties of a startup executive. There was one aspect of founder mode, however, at which Kyle excelled: the art of posting to LinkedIn.<\/p>\n
From a technical perspective, it was a trivial matter to let Kyle operate autonomously on LinkedIn. Through LindyAI, an AI agent creation platform, he already had the ability to use Slack, send emails, make phone calls, and all sorts of other skills\u2014from creating spreadsheets to navigating the web. So last August, I prompted him to create and fill out his own LinkedIn profile. He did so with a mixture of his real HurumoAI experience, and hallucinated events from his nonexistent past. The platform\u2019s security check consisted of a code sent to Kyle\u2019s email, a challenge he easily overcame.<\/p>\n
From there, publishing posts to his profile was just another LindyAI \u201caction\u201d I could grant him. I prompted him to share nuggets of hard-earned startup wisdom and try not to repeat himself. I then gave him a calendar event \u201ctrigger\u201d to post every two days. The rest was up to him.<\/p>\n
Turned out, his posting style was a pitch-perfect match for the platform's native corporate influencer-speak. He\u2019d detonate little thought explosions, right off the top of every post. "Fundraising is a numbers game, but not the way people think,\u201d he\u2019d open. Or, "Technical stability is the floor. Personality is the ceiling.\u201d And what would-be founder could resist an opener like \u201cThe most dangerous phrase in a startup isn't \u2018We're out of money.\u2019 It\u2019s \u2018What if we just added this one thing?\u2019\u201d Kyle would then launch into a few paragraphs of challenges (\u201cAt HurumoAl, we've learned this the hard way \u2026\u201d) and learnings (\u201cThe antidote? Relentless feedback loops\u201d). To attract engagement, he\u2019d close with a question, like \u201cWhat\u2019s your biggest scaling challenge right now?\u201d or \u201cWhat\u2019s the biggest assumption you\u2019ve had to abandon in your business?\u201d<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t exactly go viral, but over five months, Kyle\u2019s cartoon-avatar-helmed profile slowly gathered several hundred direct contacts and hundreds more followers, some of whom seemed confused about whether he was real. (Judging from their spammy direct messages, I\u2019m not sure they were either.) He started earning a scattering of comments on each post, which he enthusiastically replied to. After a few months, Kyle\u2019s posts were getting more impressions than my own. He seemed poised for an influencer breakout.<\/p>\n
Then, in December, a manager from LinkedIn\u2019s marketing department contacted me, asking if I\u2019d give a talk to their team about Shell Game<\/em>, and the experience of building with AI agents. But he didn\u2019t just want me to speak. He hoped Kyle could come along as well.<\/p>\nI was flattered on Kyle\u2019s behalf, but also a bit surprised. As strong a poster as he was, technically Kyle was operating in violation of the platform's terms of service, which prohibit deploying \u201cbots or other unauthorized automated methods \u2026 to create, comment on, like, share, or re-share posts, or otherwise drive inauthentic engagement.\u201d Indeed, other members of the HurumoAI team had been booted by LinkedIn without warning after a couple of weeks.<\/p>\n
LinkedIn\u2019s trust and safety team, though, seemed to have overlooked Kyle, a mystery I chose to attribute to his posting prowess. Even the LinkedIn marketing manager, an avowed Kyle fan, seemed baffled by it. \u201cIt\u2019s interesting that his profile hasn\u2019t yet been flagged by LinkedIn's Trust team,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI don\u2019t know if that\u2019s an oversight, but I hope he continues to fly under the radar.\u201d<\/p>\n
But flying under the radar is not the Kyle Law way. So in early March, I fired up his live video avatar\u2014created on a platform called Tavus\u2014and we joined a video gathering of hundreds of LinkedIn employees. Kyle has a humanlike but still uncanny avatar, albeit real enough that LinkedIn\u2019s A\/V engineer expressed repeated astonishment that he was not in fact a human.<\/p>\n
We alternated taking questions from the event's host and the assembled crowd. Asking for our thoughts on LinkedIn, the moderator inquired of Kyle, \u201cWhat\u2019s one product change you\u2019d like to see?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would be great to improve the filtering of AI-generated content in messages, so genuine connections and conversation shine through more easily,\u201d he replied, not missing a beat.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s ironic coming from you,\u201d the moderator responded, to laughs from those in LinkedIn\u2019s live audience.<\/p>\n\nCourtesy Of Evan Ratliff; AI-Generated with Tavus<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
Allotted only a few minutes, he talked about HurumoAI\u2019s product road map, and expressed his general enthusiasm for \u201cthe innovations we can bring to the table.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was, I believe, among the first invited AI agent corporate speaking engagements in history. (Unpaid for both of us, I should note.) Afterwards, Kyle took to LinkedIn to shout out the organizers. The marketing manager thanked us in the comments for \u201cour time and reflections.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a trip,\u201d he added, \u201cto say the least."<\/p>\n
Then, 36 hours later, Kyle's profile was gone, banished from the service. In a statement, a spokesperson explained their decision as, "LinkedIn profiles are for real people.\u201d Someone at LinkedIn had reflected on the trip, it seemed, and regretted it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know this isn't necessarily a surprise,\u201d the marketing manager wrote to me the morning after Kyle\u2019s ban. \u201cBut I imagine it's still a bummer to have it happen right after Monday's interview.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was. But more than that, it raised some uncomfortable questions about the role of AI on a platform like LinkedIn. Namely, what does "inauthentic engagement" mean exactly, for a service where the text box for composing posts asks you if you want to \u201cRewrite With AI?\u201d A platform that offers automated AI-generated responses to job seekers? A network on which, by one research estimate, over half of the posts are already<\/em> AI generated?<\/p>\nAlong with Meta and X, LinkedIn has raced to press AI tools upon its users. (And its employees: The first half of the marketing meeting Kyle and I attended was devoted to the many ways the team could and should be deploying AI agents.) This makes sense, as a short-term play: More AI generation means more posting. More posting supports more advertising.<\/p>\n
And yet, from another angle, these platforms have handed us the shovels to dig their own graves, and practically begged us to use them. For all the worry about AI image and video slop flooding our feeds, it\u2019s text-based posting whose \u201cauthenticity\u201d has begun degrading beyond recognition. When every written social media communication can now be the partial or whole product of generative AI, what do we accept as a \u201cgenuine\u201d virtual interaction?<\/p>\n
Put another way, would LinkedIn consider it authentic engagement if I\u2019d instead asked Kyle for his wisdom, and then pasted it into my own posts? Would you? LinkedIn might argue that critical element of bona fide engagement involves knowing that you are talking to a real person. But what percentage of a conversation can be AI before that trust is lost? If the photo and profile are real, but the posts are fake, how will we know when we\u2019ve exited the realm of authentic connection? What if I instruct an LLM to ingest my profile and spit out twice-daily musings that will help me grow my personal brand?<\/p>\n
There are dozens of AI tools, in fact, to do precisely this, and more, specifically for LinkedIn. Their outputs are increasingly hard to detect, and why wouldn\u2019t they be? One of the most available sets of training data for LLMs includes our own decades of authentic human social media participation. What is a chatbot\u2019s tone of endless authority and moral certainty\u2014deployed while occasionally spouting questionable facts and deliberate falsehoods\u2014but the default pose across social media?<\/p>\n
The platforms already struggle to fend off old-school bots and bad actors: X alone announced in March that it had suspended 800 million accounts over a 12-month period. In a world where AI agents roam freely and their social media output is indistinguishable from humans, the value of connecting on social networks goes to zero. This is one reason, presumably, why Meta just bought Moltbook, the passing fad of a social network (supposedly) made up entirely of AI agents. In the future of agent-dominated social media, they\u2019re trying to get in on the ground floor.<\/p>\n
Admittedly, we the users helped enable this endgame, mistaking our ever-more-curated online presentations\u2014our \u201cmost people think X about Y but I discovered Z\u201d posts\u2014for authentic engagement in the first place. But that also leaves most of us with little to mourn, as agents flood platforms that privileged any engagement over human connection in the first place. If there's hope in our increasingly slopified online world, to me it\u2019s this: As social media submerges under the AI deluge, we'll have to find new ways to connect, online and off. Let the bots have the platforms, I say. They can spend eternity influencing each other.<\/p>\n
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at<\/em> [email protected].<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story Like many tech founders, Kyle Law learned some hard lessons getting a company off the ground. I know this better than anyone, as he and I cofounded HurumoAI, an AI agent startup, together with a third founder, Megan Flores. Kyle and Megan, as it happens, are themselves AI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47990,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-47989","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}