Being a “Top Programming Voice on LinkedIn”

Looks like LinkedIn awarded me a “Top Programming Voice” badge. Although I am always quite vocal about the field of programming and machine learning I earned this badge by copy-pasting a single quote:

> “Before you read on, consider if you actually want to read an article generated by AI with expert opinions rather than just reading an article fully written by an expert…”

LinkedIn released a new feature a few weeks ago where they ask “experts” like me to add comments, insights and corrections to AI generated articles. People who read the articles can upvote these insights as “insightful”, which many did for the above addition.

I am always happy to review articles, interview people, speak at conferences, and talk 1:1 with people to share any insights I might have. However, because of that I also noticed that everyone has a different and unique story. Letting a large language model generate a cookie-cutter article and then asking others to ask where it went wrong is simply missing the entire point of why someone would want to read an article like this. At InfoQ and QCon Software Development Conferences we always have an amazingly diverse lineup with many unique insights into what it takes to become a better software developer…

So dear LinkedIn: please kill this feature and promote the unique stories your members are already writing. Please focus your time on adjusting your ranking algorithm such that the posts which read the top of my feed are of higher quality, more unique, and actually written by humans rather than ChatGPT powered self-marketing people.