Yesterday, I attended a LinkedIn press event in New York City. In addition to the free bagels, juice, coffee, and crudités, I was presented with a suite of new premium AI tools that the platform publicly unveiled this morning.
Some are for recruiters and job seekers, like AI-powered messaging tools, bots that write cover letters, resume reviewers, and so on. LinkedIn has been integrating AI on the platform for a while now. But some of these new changes are pretty drastic. And many of them will impact creators in immediate ways.
AI Insights
For starters, for Premium users, posts will now be accompanied by AI-generated summaries of the content. There will also be personalized suggestions for how to “dig deeper” with additional learning questions and content recommendations.
This, along with all the other features announced today, is for LinkedIn Premium members only. Subscriptions start at $39.99/month or $239/year.
Brand Campaign Generators
Arguably most notable of all was the announcement of an AI brand campaign generator in the works. In the demo, LinkedIn showed how brands can now plug in a prompt or website. LinkedIn will crawl it to create a suggested ad campaign along with copy.
The feature is integrated with Microsoft Designer, which generates images and graphic designs based on the prompts. (In case you didn’t know, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft.)
When I asked if AI-generated video and audio were in the works, the demo-er vaguely said that generative video is the “obvious next step.” I also asked if influencer marketing campaigns will be a part of this new AI-powered advertising suite, and the employee said that is “definitely where we’re heading.”
Considering this, I think it’s fair to assume LinkedIn will eventually develop its own version of TikTok’s controversial generative AI suite for advertisers, which is planning on developing AI-generated virtual influencers and currently offers abilities like scriptwriting and video production for brands.
With tools like these in development, I can’t quite see why brands would pay creators the same rates when marketers can now punch a few buttons and get the exact content they want for a fraction of the cost and hassle. But anyway, moving on.
AI Chat Bots
LinkedIn also announced that some creators are being recruited to create Premium AI “coaching” chatbots based on their likeness, name, expertise, and course materials. So far, industry darlings like Alicia Reece, Anil Gupta, Gemma Leigh Roberts, and Lisa Gates are participating.
When I asked how and if experts and creators will be compensated for this chatbot program, I was told that, at least for now, it’s on a case-by-case partnership basis.
In addition, moving forward, premium learning courses made by creators will also include AI summaries and bots that will answer questions about the course content. Yippee.
How does LinkedIn train its AI?
During a Q&A toward the end of the press event, I asked a panel of LinkedIn executives how exactly LinkedIn trained these new AI tools. I also asked if it’s possible to opt out of terms allowing AI training on your content. After all, companies like Adobe are catching a lot of flack for terms like that this week.
The executives on stage sort of ducked and bobbed my question. Instead, they mostly chose to explain how AI will “help” creators and “enhance” their work, rather than replace it.
But one executive did say, “A lot of the AI tools that we have, at least in the professional knowledge spectrum, are not yet at that point where they are either trained on [user] data or there are opt-outs.” Instead, she explained, LinkedIn pulls out keywords from posts and uses an AI language model. This model highlights key points or suggests follow-up deeper learning questions.
No one discussed how LinkedIn built the new generative AI tool for advertisers. But it seems like the image generator comes from Microsoft Design. And the details of how Microsoft trains its AI are… iffy, to say the least.
When I asked LinkedIn for further comment on how it uses user data to train its AI, it said users can “access, edit, and delete their data at any time.” It pointed to its Privacy Policy and User Agreement, which don’t explicitly mention anything about AI training.
“Down the road, it’s a really good question on how we want to think about that spectrum,” the executive at the event added.
While ye old LinkedIn executives were insistent that such drastic AI changes will improve creators’ lives, they were clear on one thing — everything we know about work is going to rapidly change.
So we better grin and bear it. And, if we’re lucky, sign a swanky new partnership with the tech overlords to make ourselves into an AI clone. Up to us.
