The networking platform – social media’s answer to boomer grandparents – is rapidly becoming an AI slop dystopia. Which made it the perfect place for my Nvidia-inspired fairytale
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hen electronic musician Grimes – AKA Claire Boucher – took to X last year to claim she was “only gonna be releasing music on LinkedIn from now on”, it seemed like yet another provocation from an often eccentric artist. But the ex-partner of Elon Musk may have followed through on her promise. Last month, a profile purporting to be the 38-year-old appeared on the world’s least gratifying social networking platform. Its only post so far promotes an appearance at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference – Nvidia being the most valuable company in the world and the engine behind just about all AI applications.
Pivoting to LinkedIn might seem a depressing thing for an artist to resort to: a bit like moving in with your boomer grandparents. And it is. I should know because, in one of the more counterintuitive brags I’ve made in my two-decade career as an artist, I did it first.
My latest art project, Image Empire – a public information film about 3D worlds and AI deepfakes, told in the guise of a children’s fairytale – was released on LinkedIn in early March. It did some pretty good numbers, but sank quickly thanks to LinkedIn’s clunky algorithm, which likes to stockpile content and drip-feed it slowly to users via constant push notifications. In fact, just like when your grandparents give you out-of-date biscuits from the back of the kitchen cupboard, LinkedIn also likes to offer stale goods – job ads that expired three weeks ago, for instance. And just like visiting your grandparents, a trip to LinkedIn involves a whole lot of biting your tongue and smiling politely.
