AI;DR is now a thing…
LINKEDIN IS DROWNING IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ARTIFICIAL INTEREST…We automated the content. Then the comments. Now we’re wondering why nobody trusts anybody.
There’s a new species roaming LinkedIn.
You’ve probably encountered it.
It appears within seconds of someone publishing a thoughtful post.
It enthusiastically agrees.
It summarises the author’s argument.
It adds absolutely nothing and it usually finishes with something like:
"Great perspective! The intersection of innovation and authentic leadership is truly transformative."
Mate! Nobody talks like that, not even the person whose AI wrote it.
Welcome to the latest chapter of the AI revolution.
We’ve automated pretending to care and I think it’s time we had a proper conversation about what that’s doing to professional relationships.
1. Congratulations: We’ve Automated the Conversation Nobody Was Having.
Let’s acknowledge something.
LinkedIn was hardly a paradise of authentic human interaction before generative AI arrived.
We already had the motivational philosophers (aKa wankers!)
The humblebrag merchants (aKa showbags!)
The people who turned buying a coffee into seven lessons about leadership ( aKa tossers!)
and, naturally, the occasional CEO announcing that rejecting a job applicant taught them the meaning of Christmas.
AI didn’t invent performative engagement.
It simply made it cheaper, faster and infinitely more scalable.
Now, instead of someone manually leaving 20 meaningless comments, a workflow can potentially generate hundreds. #winning
Each one carefully crafted to appear thoughtful.
Each one designed to attract attention.
Each one pretending there’s a human being genuinely interested in the conversation, and therein lies the problem.
We’ve confused the ability to generate language with the ability to create relationships.
Those are two very different capabilities and I’m over it!
2. The Real Problem Isn’t AI. It’s Artificial Interest.
I run businesses focused on AI, automation and decision systems. I’m hardly going to argue that businesses should stop using AI. That would be a fairly spectacular own goal; but there’s an important distinction between using AI to support your thinking and using AI to impersonate your interest.
Consider two scenarios.
Scenario A: AI-assisted engagement
You read an interesting LinkedIn article.
You disagree with part of the argument.
You use AI to research a counterpoint, test your reasoning or tighten your response.
Then you publish a comment that reflects what you genuinely think.
That’s useful…AI helped you communicate better.
Scenario B: Automated engagement
An Agent scans hundreds of posts.
Identifies relevant keywords.
Generates agreeable comments.
Publishes them under your name and moves on to the next target.
You haven’t read the posts.
You don’t know the authors.
You probably couldn’t explain what your comments mean.
That’s not engagement.
That’s automated social camouflage, and the distinction matters, because professional relationships depend on something algorithms cannot manufacture on your behalf.
Genuine interest.
3. We’ve Started Measuring the Wrong Things
Here’s where this becomes a business problem.
AI-powered marketing tools increasingly promise to help organisations generate more content, reach more people and increase engagement and some of those tools are genuinely useful, but what are we measuring?
Comments generated?
Posts published?
Impressions?
Profile visits?
Connection requests?
Those are activity metrics. They are not necessarily relationship metrics.
You can generate 500 comments without creating a single meaningful conversation.
You can accumulate thousands of impressions without building credibility.
You can automate every touchpoint in a sales process and still have nobody who actually trusts you.
Activity is not authority.
Visibility is not credibility.
Engagement is not necessarily connection and if your marketing strategy confuses those things, AI will simply help you make the mistake faster.
4. The Hidden Cost: Reputational Debt
Businesses understand technical debt…but reputational debt? Not so much!
Build something quickly.
Take shortcuts.
Ignore the underlying problems.
Eventually, the accumulated mess becomes expensive.
I think we’re entering a similar period with AI-driven communication and I’m calling it reputational debt.
Every generic comment.
Every irrelevant automated message.
Every fabricated expression of interest.
Every AI-generated interaction pretending to be personal.
Individually, they might seem harmless.
Collectively, they can damage the credibility of the person or business behind them and trust is considerably harder to rebuild than a workflow.
Imagine a potential client discovers that your thoughtful engagement with their posts was generated by an automation you’ve never reviewed.
How authentic does your relationship suddenly feel?
Or imagine someone replies to your supposedly insightful comment with a genuine question and you have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.
That’s not a technology failure.
That’s a judgement failure.
5. Let’s Not Pretend Human-Written Comments Are Automatically Better
Here’s where I disagree with the anti-AI purists.
A manually typed comment isn’t automatically valuable and an AI-assisted comment isn’t automatically worthless.
Someone typing:
"Well said!" hasn’t necessarily contributed more than someone using AI to develop a thoughtful, evidence-based response.
The quality of engagement should be judged by its substance, not simply by whether a machine helped produce the words.
AI can help professionals:
- Research unfamiliar subjects before contributing.
- Challenge their own assumptions.
- Translate complex ideas into plain English.
- Communicate more clearly.
- Identify useful questions.
- Develop constructive counterarguments.
- Participate in conversations outside their immediate expertise, provided they understand and verify what they contribute.
Those are legitimate uses, the problem starts when AI stops assisting the person and starts pretending to be the person. That’s the line worth defending.
6. The C51 Authenticity Test
Here’s a practical framework I’d encourage anyone using AI for professional engagement to adopt…Before publishing an AI-assisted comment, ask four questions.
Did I actually read the original post?
Not the AI summary.
Not the headline.
The actual post.
If you haven’t understood the argument, why are you contributing to the conversation?
Am I adding something?
A useful example.
A relevant experience.
A thoughtful disagreement.
An additional insight.
A question that moves the discussion forward.
Repeating the author’s argument in slightly different words isn’t a contribution, it’s a summary wearing a suit.
Would I defend this comment in person?
Imagine the author asks you to explain your position over coffee.
Could you?
Would you stand behind it?
If not, perhaps your AI has developed an opinion you don’t actually possess.
Am I prepared to continue the conversation?
This might be the most important question.
If someone responds, will you engage?
Will you listen?
Will you challenge?
Will you learn?
Or has your automation already moved on to its next 200 targets?
If you can’t answer yes to all four, don’t publish the comment.
It’s a remarkably simple governance framework and unlike most corporate AI policies, someone might actually use it.
7. The Bigger Issue: We’re Automating the Human Parts of Business
This conversation goes well beyond LinkedIn.
Think about what’s happening across organisations.
AI writes the sales outreach.
AI drafts the follow-up.
AI creates the personalised message.
AI handles customer questions.
AI summarises employee feedback.
AI generates performance reviews.
AI prepares the thank-you note.
Individually, each application might save time, but collectively, we need to ask a harder question.
Are we using AI to make human relationships stronger, or simply to reduce the amount of human effort required to maintain them?
Those aren’t necessarily the same thing…
A customer doesn’t always want another automated response.
Sometimes they want someone to listen.
An employee doesn’t necessarily need a beautifully written AI-generated performance review.
They need a manager who understands their contribution.
A potential business partner doesn’t need a perfectly personalised message generated from their LinkedIn profile.
They need a reason to believe you’re genuinely interested in working together.
AI can support all those interactions, but it shouldn’t automatically replace them.
8. What Smart Businesses Should Automate Instead
At c51, we focus on designing AI systems around real operational problems.
Missing information.
Repetitive administration.
Disconnected workflows.
Poor visibility.
Unresolved exceptions.
Manual reporting.
Decision bottlenecks.
Those are excellent automation opportunities.
Why? Because removing that work creates capacity for something more valuable.
Better decisions.
Better service.
Better conversations.
Better relationships.
The objective should be to automate the work surrounding human relationships, not the relationships themselves.
Consider the difference.
Bad automation:
An Agent automatically comments on 100 LinkedIn posts to create the appearance of engagement.
Better automation:
An Agent identifies five relevant industry conversations, researches the issues, highlights potential opportunities and prepares briefing notes.
You then decide where to contribute; Personally, with an informed perspective.
The second approach may generate fewer comments, but it has a much better chance of creating a conversation worth having and that’s the point.
9. AI Agents Need Boundaries, Not Just Capabilities
This also connects directly to a broader issue we’ve been exploring the wider C51 ecosystem including KAOS AI and the CONTROL Operating System and AI is OK via #AGI360 pathways…
AI governance must operate where AI takes action.
It’s one thing to tell an Agent:
"Engage professionally and authentically."
It’s another to define what that actually means.
Can the Agent publish without approval?
Can it make claims on your behalf?
Can it contact prospects?
Can it represent your opinions?
Can it continue conversations autonomously?
What happens when someone challenges its response?
Who is accountable for what gets published?
These aren’t hypothetical questions, they’re practical design decisions and as businesses deploy more autonomous AI systems, they’ll become increasingly important.
The next generation of AI governance won’t simply be about preventing data leaks or inaccurate answers. It will also need to address authority, representation and accountability, because when an Agent speaks under your name, the reputational consequences are yours, not the machine’s.
10. The Real Competitive Advantage Might Be Being Human
Here’s the irony.
As AI-generated content becomes easier to produce, genuinely useful human insight may become more valuable; Not because AI can’t produce sophisticated language.
It absolutely can.
Because credibility depends on more than language. It depends on experience, consistency, judgement, accountability, original thinking and the willingness to stand behind what you say.
In a world where everyone can generate an impressive paragraph in seconds, the question changes.
It’s no longer:
"Can you create content?"
It’s:
"Do you have something worth saying?"
That’s a much higher bar and one worth aiming for.
The c51 Take: Don’t Confuse Scale With Substance
I believe AI will fundamentally change how businesses communicate, market, sell and operate.
That’s precisely why we need to be more deliberate about where we use it.
AI should make us better informed.
Better prepared.
More responsive.
More capable.
It should help us identify opportunities and remove unnecessary work, but if we’re using it to manufacture relationships, impersonate interest and flood professional networks with meaningless engagement, we’re missing the opportunity.
We’re not building better businesses.
We’re simply industrialising the noise and eventually, people stop listening.
AI;DR: Here’s the Point.
Use AI to research.
Use AI to think.
Use AI to challenge.
Use AI to prepare.
Use AI to remove repetitive work, but when it comes to building trust?
Show up. Have an opinion. Mean what you say; because the problem isn’t that AI is making LinkedIn less human.
It’s that some people are using AI to pretend they were interested in other humans in the first place and no amount of automation is going to fix that.
Automate the admin. Not the authenticity.
Start small. Build fast. Automate the boring stuff.
If you’re serious about moving from AI curiosity to AI capability, start with clarity – strategy, governance and outcomes first.
Until next time, stay curious, stay scrappy, and remember: AI is OK.
– Steve AGI (yeah, that’s my real last name… AI was never optional)
👉 Grab your free AI business audit at https://aiisok.app
#AGIsGotThis #AIisOK #C51Consulting #AIAgents #AILeadership #LinkedIn #ResponsibleAI