AI is creating ghostwriting jobs on LinkedIn

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Hello. Isabel has kindly let me take over the top of today’s newsletter while she is away, but you can still read her Working It wisdom in the latest instalment of the AI Clinic — a new feature where she answers your dilemmas and problems about using AI at work.

More on that later, but first: the rise of ghostwriters penning LinkedIn posts for CEOs from their bedrooms.

Keeping it real ✍️

I will be honest. I scroll through LinkedIn almost daily. I put up with the seemingly bottomless pit of cringe posts because I have found it to be a source of stories. Someone might share some striking data or write a plea for help from their niche industry. LinkedIn has strategised to become a platform where legitimate news publishers operate.

On the flip side, as professionals crowd on to LinkedIn to “signal” to the platform’s 1bn users they are active and lead the conversation in their field, it has descended into a factory for AI slop. There is now a word for the type of generic writing that is riddled with clichés and line breaks: “broetry”.

Startups have capitalised on the demand by attention-thirsty entrepreneurs to grow their following and avoid the time-consuming job of writing opinions. There is no need to agonise over how to phrase a product announcement: AI-powered post generators can churn one out in seconds. Some users even outsource the AI posting; offshore Filipino “virtual assistants” are reportedly being paid $7 an hour to feed prompts into ChatGPT and post on LinkedIn on behalf of western executives.

About 81 per cent of long posts on the platform in July were likely AI-generated, according to research by Originality AI, a company that focuses on AI detection. That month, LinkedIn introduced a function where you can flag any post as “AI slop” and it is removed from your feed.

We are now reaching the point where the onslaught of low-quality content is making users yearn for human posts and pay a premium for them. AI is creating more opportunity for ghostwriters to snap up clients on LinkedIn. Toronto-based Tony Albrecht, who has a team of nine ghostwriters serving about 40 US lawyers, says his business has more than doubled in the past year.

One UK ghostwriter and ex-journalist, who earns roughly £350 per LinkedIn post, told me:

People thought AI was going to destroy ghostwriting, as you can ask ChatGPT to write for you. But, first, people can tell if it’s ghostwritten by AI, and second, maybe 1 per cent of business founders happen to be amazing writers — but for the other 99 per cent, that’s not their job, and it doesn’t have to be . . . We are telling a story and trying to humanise founders and then their companies through that.

People thought AI was going to destroy ghostwriting, as you can ask ChatGPT to write for you. But, first, people can tell if it’s ghostwritten by AI, and second, maybe 1 per cent of business founders happen to be amazing writers — but for the other 99 per cent, that’s not their job, and it doesn’t have to be . . . We are telling a story and trying to humanise founders and then their companies through that.

It’s typically done through an agency. First, they interview the CEO/founder for an hour or so, finding a careful balance between divulging how their business operates and not exposing their secret to success. “I’ll be like a typical journalist — asking the founder questions and pushing them if I don’t get a straight answer back,” the ghostwriter said.

Sakshi Agrawal, a LinkedIn ghostwriter who is originally from Nepal and works for Indian founders, said she had to build up their trust by checking in with them via voice note every month because they are hesitant about putting their personal lives on show. Although she writes alone in her bedroom, she said the ghostwriting community in India is tight-knit and she enjoys virtually swapping tips with her fellow ghostwriters.

We have long had ghostwriters and press managers, but what’s new is how the profession has developed, ironically, as a reaction to the “influx of polished content” generated by AI in recent years, as Agrawal described it.

When you outsource to AI, the output is generally trained on a corpus of other people’s (typically mediocre) text. This fuels what LinkedIn itself observed in June as a rise in AI posts that “lack any real unique perspective or substance”. We cannot prompt an AI to think of a distinctive idea or gain a holistic understanding of a subject in the way we can with human writers.

I asked Bernie Hogan, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, whether he thought LinkedIn ghostwriters would help cut through the tide of AI slop, or if it was another worrying sign that we are investing less in our own communication skills. Hogan said it was rational to hire a ghostwriter, especially when “you might be deliberating too much over what might be a half an hour job for a good writer”.

The message behind the post can still be sincere. He compares this to buying a greeting card: someone else wrote the words, but the sentiment can still genuinely reflect what you mean. Yet because we cannot tell when a LinkedIn post is ghostwritten, it is inauthentic regardless of whether it is broadly what the person posting it believes.

It appears not all ghostwriting companies want to put the work in either. As , some unscrupulous LinkedIn “branding” agencies are accused of leveraging their own pool of client accounts to artificially lift the engagement rate, rather than actually building a client’s reputation organically. This is done through an “engagement pod”, a group of accounts systematically liking and commenting on one another’s posts in an attempt to catch LinkedIn’s algorithm.

But I suspect these shortcuts, like AI “broetry”, won’t pay off in the long term and as Hogan said, if we add too many signals, “they start to become noise”. The battle for white-collar professionals’ attention has stepped up a notch — and maybe it is a good thing that we are putting a premium on content that is well researched and necessarily embraces the craft of writing. But the broader question about what the growth of these intermediary layers means for our relationships online is a fascinating, unsettling one.

AI Clinic 🩺

The problem: Plenty of people are using AI in our business, with the encouragement of the board and senior leadership. But not many managers are giving us real examples of how to cut workloads, and we have no system that captures and shares best practice. It feels to me that early adopters are using their AI fluency to boost their profile — and the wider productivity benefits for the business are being lost.

The answer: You are not alone in facing this issue, Isabel Berwick writes. McKinsey research shows 80 per cent of employees report productivity gains from using AI, but only 37 per cent of companies report “enterprise-level” financial gains from AI use.

Justin Angsuwat, chief people and customer engagement officer at Culture Amp, knows your scenario well, and says the result is that AI fluency “stays as personal ‘capital’ instead of becoming company capability”. Changing that is down to managers: “Ask each team to bring one concrete example to a regular meeting: what the workflow was, what AI changed, and what work will now stop. Capture them somewhere searchable, so they become organisational knowledge rather than a profile-building advantage for early adopters.” Culture Amp is an employee engagement platform, so I wasn’t surprised with this suggestion 🏆: “Reward the team that retires a process, not just the individual with the cleverest use.”

Justin has been in charge of the tech transformation internally at Culture Amp (“I don’t take that lightly.”) His process? “We started with the work, not the tools: principles first, then our risk tolerance, then the guardrails.”

His tip for you? Measure two things: who is using AI and what the organisation has stopped doing as a result.

Got an AI problem, tip or expert take? We can feature it in AI Clinic. All problems are anonymised 🤫. Email: [email protected]

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Who’s up and who’s down among the FTSE 100 bosses? Some chief executives were paid more than £10mn this year — double the average across the group.
2. The gig economy was never a great safety net, but now automation poses a new danger to delivery workers and freelancers. Sarah O’Connor investigates.
3. The host of The Diary of a CEO podcast, Steven Bartlett, tells the FT that his audience are “strivers” who “want to have their mind expanded”.
4. We won’t solve young people’s worklessness without listening to them.
5. Craig Coben comes through with a sage column on why we shouldn’t regret the “bad stuff” that shape our careers.

Who’s up and who’s down among the FTSE 100 bosses? Some chief executives were paid more than £10mn this year — double the average across the group.

The gig economy was never a great safety net, but now automation poses a new danger to delivery workers and freelancers. Sarah O’Connor investigates.

The host of The Diary of a CEO podcast, Steven Bartlett, tells the FT that his audience are “strivers” who “want to have their mind expanded”.

We won’t solve young people’s worklessness without listening to them

.

Craig Coben comes through with a sage column on why we shouldn’t regret the “bad stuff” that shape our careers.

One more thing . . .

Vivi Koroma Kala went on the BBC recently to talk about her experience applying for a job and what she felt was an instant AI-enabled rejection that did not take the time to assess her skills. Does this resonate with you? How have you adapted to this era of AI in recruitment? The FT’s Work and Careers team wants to know how AI tools are being used by jobseekers too in the recruitment process and would love your stories. Email me [email protected]

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