Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

The author opens with a confession that LinkedIn has unexpectedly become an important social network for them, despite being clumsy and boring — likening it to Gerald Ford as the 'normal' network left standing while other platforms imploded. This sets up a 'real talk' conversation about how too many users are turning to LLMs to generate content, especially since LinkedIn itself cheerfully offers to 'rewrite it with AI.'

The central complaint is that LLM-generated writing is stylistically grating and easily identified by familiar tells: excessive emojis, single-sentence paragraphs, formulaic 'it's not just… but also' constructions, and em-dashes that most people do not naturally use. To anyone exposed to even a modest amount of AI output, the LLM fingerprints are impossible to ignore, and the author describes this as having one's 'intellectual fly open.' The consequence is not just embarrassment: when a person whose perspective you value is clearly using an LLM, the reader cannot trust whether the content — or the identity behind it — is real. Many people, the author notes, silently stop reading.

The essay ends by reaffirming that LLMs are genuinely useful for brainstorming, understanding text, and serving as good (and safely ignorable) editors. But they are, in the author's view, lousy writers and, above all, not the individual behind the post. The advice is straightforward: trust your own voice and write your own content.