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by FinnLobsien·2mo ago·view on hn ↗
As someone who works in marketing, this is extremely true. Right now, LLMs are causing a lot of one-time cashing in of trust.

I've seen this pattern a bunch:

1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.

2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.

3. They post the content

4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up

5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.

6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.

There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.

(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)

4 comments
> a lot of one-time cashing in of trust.

I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term.

Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.

> I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to.

When I was younger, we had the Jetsons, the tail end of the space race, Star Trek, Carl Sagan, home computers took off, we witnessed increasing standards of living, politics were deescalating, the fall of the Berlin Wall and (effectively) the end of the imminent nuclear annihilation threat. Lots of reasons to be hopeful for the future and to see sci-fi-like technical progress as progress and empowerment.

Nowadays, we have no hopeful vision of the future--not even in sci-fi. We know tomorrow is going to be worse than today. We know technology advancements are meant to siphon our money and time away. We're not going to get flying cars, but we'll get costly subscriptions for everything. We're not going to get tours of Jupiter, but we will get mass-surveillance and phone addictions. Political extremism is increasing, with anger, belligerence, cruelty, and ignorance being major planks in political parties across the world. And finally, we know Climate Change is going to wreck everything, even if none of that comes to pass. Current generations no longer believe they will have it better than previous generations.

I agree with what you’re talking about but I don’t agree this is analogous.

I’m talking about a one-time cashing in of trust one already has built up, not saying whatever the algorithm demands to go viral.

These people already have the thing others are expecting from content creation!

I think this is different from the short-term phenomenon you describe where people want to get rich quick via crypto/prediction markets/wallstreetbets/etc.

It’s much more like you already have enough to retire on, but cash it all out because your cousin’s tattoo artist’s stepson recently got a bachelor’s in finance and they won’t charge any management fees.

X is itself a massive cash-in of trust by the new owner.

But yes, a lot of the tech industry these days resembles people looking at a rainforest and thinking how much value could be derived from clear-cutting it. Massive one-time extraction of value, long term destruction of an ecosystem, resulting in harms distributed all over the world in ways that aren't obviously linked.

Path to X happiness:

- Eschew the "For You", Read tweets only from people you have chosen to follow.

- Only follow people who have a bona fide livelihood outside social media, avoid anyone for whom income is largely driven by "engagement".

I agree, but sadly it’s kinda like telling someone the best way to have fun at the casino without losing too much.

It’s an environment designed for the exact opposite of your best intentions.

>Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn

... You don't actually advise them to post on LinkedIn, do you? You know all the engagement on LinkedIn is fake, right?

I just started posting on LinkedIn. It is a more niche audience, Finns, only 5 million of us. I know my posts aren't fake and the people there are one I know. What do you mean by fake? Do you mean fake as in "I am here to sell you my product, which is myself" kind of fake? Is that a feature of LinkedIn or the harsh reality of the "adult world" business? Like sitting in a bunch of meetings trying to figure which of the parties are trying to screw you the least when you're about to buy something. There's levels of fake and you just need to figure out the rest. In a sense yes, of course it's fake, but I'm not sure that the platform is to blame. Same as IG I guess, but I can't say I don't use it.
I've never seen a single LinkedIn post that wasn't overinflated horseshit like "I was late for a job interview and stopped to feed a starving dog. I missed the job interview. The next day I got a call from the CEO of the company offering me a management position. Turns out he was the dog. Never compromise who you are. #grindset"

These days it's all just that, or else people flinging AI slop past each other.

I have never seen a single piece of content on LinkedIn that I felt was genuine, or that wasn't obvious engagement bait.