LinkedIn Is Flooded With AI. Here’s Why That’s Good News.

I was recently in Florida for the Make Big Happen summit. About 400 CEOs attended. AI was the theme.

When LinkedIn came up, the reaction was consistent. The feed is flooded with AI content. It’s pushing them to disengage.

CEOs aren’t the only ones noticing.

Scroll through LinkedIn any morning. The AI tells are everywhere:

• Tidy lists of three
• Packed with em-dashes
• “What most people miss”
• “Here’s what no one is talking about”

All of it optimized to look like insight. Very little of it actually is.

I run a thought leadership company. My writers are full-time and US-based. I have a front-row seat to the gap between great writing and the AI attempt at it.

LinkedIn is still incredibly valuable. But only if you do the harder work of sounding human.

What AI Gets Wrong About Executive Voice

There’s a version of “sounds like you” that AI can fake. It copies your cadence. It mirrors your vocabulary. For an email, that might be enough.

For an executive building credibility, it isn’t.

The harder half is the gap between how you speak and how you want to be perceived. It’s the version of you that shows up when you’re most articulate and most honest at once.

That’s where AI falls apart. It reflects back only what you give it. Push it further, and it misses your point.

I’ve watched writers spend months in conversation with a client. Then the client finally says: “Yes. That’s exactly how I would say it.”

Getting there takes live conversation. It takes real back-and-forth. It takes a writer listening for what the client hasn’t said yet.

There’s no shortcut. Trust me, we’ve looked.

How to Spot AI Writing

You’ve probably trained yourself to spot AI without realizing it. Your audience has too.

How many of these do you recognize?

• Numbered frameworks
• The rocket ship emoji
• Rule-of-three lists
• Endless em-dashes and colons
• “But here’s the thing”
• “What most people miss”

Then there are AI’s favorite words. It loves “signal” and “gap.” It calls things “real.” It says something “matters” without saying why.

It also fakes human speech. It drops in “honestly,” “actually,” and “genuinely” where they don’t fit.

There’s another tell. The voice is consistent in the wrong way. Real people have quirks. They contradict themselves. They trail off. A post that’s too polished often wasn’t written by a person.

This isn’t an argument against AI. We use it too, for research and editing.

But when you ask AI to represent your thinking, it flattens you. It molds your unique idea into the same shape as everything else.

That’s the cost. It shows up even when the output looks clean.

Why Our Retention Is Going Up

I expected AI to hurt our business. So far, the opposite has happened.

I think I know why. The flood of AI content has raised the stakes for quality. When the feed feels hollow, the human posts stand out.

Great audiences are built slowly. Through consistency. Through specificity. Through earned trust.

That’s harder to replicate now. It’s also harder to substitute.

I have a 15-year-old handcrafted chair in my office. Mass-produced furniture exists. But knowing a person made this one makes it worth keeping.

Maybe it’s the quality. Maybe it’s the story. Maybe it’s both.

The same thing is happening on LinkedIn. The executives paying attention already know the difference between a human writer and an AI one.

And so does their audience.