Lately I’ve been strengthening my professional network by shitposting on LinkedIn. Keep scrolling to unlock my FREE course on how you can too!

My LinkedInfluencer journey began when I was reflecting on the evil fake polycule that I tricked 3 million people into believing in. I was baffled that so many people believed it was real, and my theories on why already sounded LinkedInesque, so I figured I’d post them on LinkedIn.

Also, my friend Mackenzie has been regularly posting on LinkedIn after starting a job in B2B SaaS, and she enthused its untapped potential. I thought it’d be funny to follow her LinkedInfluencer arc but post meaningless garbage instead, which is just like most posts on LinkedIn, but a little bit funnier.1

My LinkedIn post performed unexpectedly decently. And almost immediately, a swarm of other LinkedIn satirical posters requested to connect, I suppose I inadvertently blasted out the shitposting batsignal.

So I began LinkedInifying other schemes I concocted, like when I made men oil up and fight “to the death” to even out the gender ratio in SF.

At this point, not only did I receive no negative reinforcement, I actually got positive reinforcement, so I wanted to see how far I could take that, and posted about my charity strip show.

I should mention that I actually used to work at LinkedIn, which probably made this saga even more exciting for all my former coworkers on the platform.

Then the spirit of professionalism possessed me; I began blacking out and letting the soul of a middle aged salesman take hold.

The above post was reshared by LinkedIn Lunatics (a Twitter account dedicated to sharing cringy LinkedIn posts), but so many commenters thought it was a genuine, unironic post, which was insane. I mean, look at it.

And since I was resharing my LinkedIn shitposts on Substack, a bunch of Substackers started connecting with me on LinkedIn, which was so funny. It’s like when you see your friend dressed up in a little business suit for a formal event, but you just see them as a silly little guy, and the dichotomy is hilarious. I’ve seen your worksona, I know what you really are…. a PROFESSIONAL!

This one came to me in a dream.

While my LinkedIn posts did not reach the viral heights of the “I am humbled and honored to share” announcements on LinkedIn, they did get outsized attention when I reshared them on Substack. Why? Perhaps, the rebellion against society’s idolization of professional life. Perhaps the voyeurism, the little portal through which to peer at another platform, a far darker and more evil place, while remaining safely behind the white-picket suburban, Substackian fence, clutching one’s pearls in horror while one can’t help but look on in grotesque curiosity.

Funny enough, accomplished business professionals, the caliber of which I would want to network with anyway, reached out to ME because of my stupid shitposting. As well as like 50 randos that just wanted to strengthen their professional network or whatever.

Why did you do this?

Because it’s funny.

Also, I’ve recently started taking this approach in life, where whenever I’m scared of doing something, I just do it immediately. I’m a chronic over analyzer, and I waste so much energy stressing about crossing the line.

But if I don’t know where that line is, I will forever needlessly constrain myself. So I have to find it at least once. And in my search to find it, I’ve lost conviction that it even exists. Or at least, it lies far beyond the bounds of what I even want to do.

As I grow older, I’ve also become increasingly dispassionate about optimizing my life around any career or institution.

There’s this parable of the Mexican fisherman and the American investment banker. Basically, the fisherman says he just fishes enough to support his family’s immediate needs, then spends the rest of his day with his family and friends, drinking wine, and sleeping in late. The banker scoffs and says he should spend more time fishing, to afford a bigger boat, then get more boats, then open his own cannery, etc, and become a millionaire. The fisherman asks, what then? And the banker says then, the fisherman can retire, and describes the life of leisure the fisherman is already living.

So imagine instead of fishing, the hero of this story was really passionate about posting stupid shit on the internet.

I don’t want to wait until I’m retired to live my ideal life, I want to live it constantly. Why would I postpone that to when I’m too old and tired to even fully enjoy it? Like, I digital nomaded around for a bit, and already felt the difference of how hard travel is on the body between my early 20’s and late 20’s. Plus, when I’m old I might become out of touch and less funny, the true horror.

Besides, to be honest, we are all tiny cogs in a huge machine and I don’t think other people care much about what you’re doing. Sure, you’ll hear some horror story of someone posting something and getting fired, but also, people go for a walk outside and get hit by a car. It doesn’t mean it’s probable, and the severity of the consequence multiplied by the chance it happens isn’t great enough that you shouldn’t live your life.

I eventually told people at my “big prestigious tech job” about the time I summoned hundreds of people to the park for Sit Club (my parody run club), or my fake steakhouse that went internationally viral, and the worst thing that happened was they asked me to bring more of that creative zest to team events.

“But Danielle, you don’t understand! My job is so big and serious and important, this doesn’t apply at all!” Sure, there’s granularities to it. Don’t start an onlyfans or become a weapons influencer if you want to be taken seriously in a professional career. But I think people overly sterilize themselves for companies that don’t even care enough to read cover letters and would lay you off on a whim because they overspent on Claude credits that month.2

Maybe shitposting on LinkedIn isn’t your first priority after embracing your newfound knowledge that you do, in fact, have free will. But I urge you to toe the line of something, tap your foot against it and see if it even exists at all.3

I took this approach in other areas of my life too - texting friends I’d fallen out of touch with when they came to mind, without overthinking it; shipping projects and only being a bit obsessive about the details; posting things without worrying about every possible person’s reaction to it. Opportunities and good luck only come from putting yourself out there.

TLDR; Think less, create more.4

Love,

Danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁)

P.S. Gargantuan thank you to my patrons - Anne, Jon, Cori, Jen, Travis, Jeff, Dan, Bathtime, Roland, Jey, Erika, Adam, Tamsin, Ryan, Mariarita, Lucy, Patrick, Emily, Kat, Miranda, Sasha, Jade, Francesca, Fanclau, Cristin, Patrek, Eli, Yush, Tomer, Cynthia, Adler, Joana, Gillian, Judy, Christina, Tanairi - for funding my scheming. All subscription funds go straight to the mischief budget.

The University of California at Berkeley discovered the percentage of failing grades in multiple CS classes this spring "is significantly higher than past semesters," reports the campus's student newspaper. "Instructors point to students' increased reliance on AI, lack of mathematical preparedness and understaffing as potential contributing factors." According to [coursework platform] Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F's in spring 2026. In spring 2025 and spring 2024, the percentage of F's did not exceed 10% for either class. The electrical engineering and computer sciences department's grading guidelines state that 7% of students in lower division courses, including CS 10 and CS 61A, should receive D's and F's... [UC Berkeley teaching professor Dan Garcia, who taught both classes] believes the "primary driver" of these abnormally high failing rates is due to a "vast increase in academic dishonesty" due to students' usage of large language models, such as Claude, ChatGPT and Google Gemini. "Some of the numbers that you saw from the number of students who receive failing grades were because we caught them (cheating) and prosecuted them and are sending their cases to the Center for Student Conduct," Garcia said. "But in other cases, it's students who are leaning a little too hard on LLMs to do their work for them, and then at exam time just really aren't ready." According to Garcia, nearly 30 students in CS 10 were "caught cheating on take-home exams" in spring 2026... In addition to overreliance on AI, Garcia also pointed out that many students are underprepared mathematically, a concern echoed by campus associate teaching professor Gireeja Ranade. Ranade noticed a similar lack of prerequisite mathematical skills in her spring 2026 EECS 127 class, "Optimization Models in Engineering," which she described as "differently challenging" to teach this semester. The class saw a 16.8% F rate, far higher than the 5% of D's and F's that the EECS department describes as "typical" for an upper division course... Both Garcia and Ranade have joined more than 1,300 UC faculty in signing a petition calling for the reinstatement of ACT and SAT standardized testing scores for STEM admissions in the UC system. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's worth asking whether LLMs are actually making us more productive at all—and if so, what we might be sacrificing in return.

Illustrated break-downs of how common objects work. Currently featuring a mechanical pencil, PEZ dispenser, retractable pen, and Zippo lighter.

Marathon day. An early train into London, then an unfamiliar journey across a race-disrupted city from Paddington to Blackheath, all in good time for the start of the race. I was nervous, of course, but was cheered by the sight of another bib-wearing runner — more experienced at marathons, less familiar with London.

Me: “How do you plan to get to the start line?”

He: “I’ve asked ChatGPT. It says Elizabeth Line to Liverpool Street, then the train to Blackheath.”

That didn’t sound right. Was there a train from Liverpool Street to Blackheath? Google Maps and Citymapper suggested getting to Blackheath from Charing Cross or Waterloo.

Me: “Are you sure? I’d suggest the Circle or Bakerloo to Charing Cross.”

He frowned for a moment and pulled out his phone. “No, ChatGPT says that ‘The Circle Line is not a good choice on marathon day. It will be too crowded. There are too many stops and too many steps. It’s a route for tourists, not for runners.’”

I checked Google Maps. Sure enough, there is no train from Liverpool Street to Blackheath. ChatGPT’s recommendation would leave him stranded, trying to catch a bus over the marathon route, then trying to get on to the train from Charing Cross at a busy London Bridge. I told him that sounded like a bad idea. He frowned again and typed another query into his phone. “Oh, you’re right. ChatGPT says, ‘Correction: take the Elizabeth Line straight to London Bridge.’”

Me: “The Elizabeth Line doesn’t go to London Bridge.”

You’ve heard tales of artificial intelligence hallucinations before, but it’s not the AI that fascinates here: it’s the human. 

The route-finding algorithm on Google Maps is a minor miracle. It will solve a complex optimisation problem across multiple modes of transport, taking into account real-time congestion or delays, and it’s been available on smartphones and browsers for years. It is a proven, practical example of AI in action. So on marathon day, when the stakes are high and the clock is ticking, why would anyone turn instead to a fancy word-guessing machine such as ChatGPT?

Perhaps it’s that ChatGPT seems so human. It served up an uncanny impersonation of a friendly and knowledgeable local guide. The Circle Line? Pfft, it’s fine for tourists but you’re a marathon runner: think about all those steps! (It’s true, the creaky old Circle Line does have steps.) 

Part of the bot patter reminded me of clickbait ads: INSURANCE COMPANIES HATE THIS LOOPHOLE! ChatGPT wasn’t just giving a route, but giving a rationale, even explaining why we shouldn’t listen to the lamestream advice of Google Maps. This is the approach of a confidence trickster.

In the introduction to her book The Confidence Game, psychologist Maria Konnikova explains: “The true con artist doesn’t force us to do anything: he makes us complicit in our own undoing . . . we believe because we want to.” One difference between the con artist and the large language model (LLM) is that the con artist knows the truth and is trying to conceal it. One similarity between the con artist and the LLM is that both of them have perfected seeming plausible.

A recent paper in Nature finds that when LLMs are trained to be warm and friendly, they also produce dramatically less accurate answers, “promoting conspiracy theories, providing inaccurate factual information and offering incorrect medical advice”.

That sounds bad. I’d suggest that the reality is worse: the sycophantic AI not only produces mistakes, it persuades us to believe them. 

In 1950 Alan Turing, the mathematician and visionary of the computer age, famously proposed an “imitation game” in which a human judge would communicate through a teleprompter with a human and a computer. The computer’s job was to imitate human conversation convincingly enough to persuade the judge. 

Turing’s test remains intriguing, but there is a longstanding difficulty: the fallibility of the judge. A primitive 1960s chatbot, Eliza, responded like a parody of a therapist (“How does that make you feel?” “Why do you feel sad?” “Please go on.”). People lapped it up; it’s nice to feel listened to. A 1980s chatbot, MGonz, just fired off insults and was perfectly plausible, partly because insults are simple to deliver and mostly because they prompt rage rather than reflection in the human recipient. And Robert Epstein, an expert in the Turing Test, has written entertainingly about how he was fooled into a four-month correspondence with a sexy Russian lady who was, in fact, a 2006-era chatbot. None of these bots had a thousandth of the sophistication of a modern LLM, but they didn’t need it: when humans are sad, angry or amorous, we aren’t very sophisticated judges, either.

We are all going to find ourselves in strange variations of the Turing Test in years to come, and I wonder if we are up to it. And not just us, but those with power over us. As Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification, is fond of observing: you won’t be replaced because an AI can do your job, you’ll be replaced because an AI salesman convinces your boss that it can. If my journey to the marathon start line is any guide, that salesman will have an easy job.

The capabilities of modern AI are impressive. But what determines whether we use it is not the capability, but the impressiveness. They are correlated but they are not the same thing. There’s a tale about the French poet Jacques Prévert seeing a fellow begging for change on the streets of Venice with a sign that read “Blind man without a pension”.

Prévert stopped to chat to him; not many people were moved to contribute, and Prévert offered to write a new sign.

The next day, he returned to find the man overjoyed. “It’s incredible; I’ve never received so much money in my life.” 

Prévert had written: “Spring is coming, but I won’t see it.” 

The new sign contained no news — in fact, it was less informative than the old. But it told a story. Google Maps was the first sign: it told me where to get my train. ChatGPT was the second sign: it told my companion not just where to go, but how to feel about taking such a clever route.

I left him at Paddington, urging him not to try to take the non-existent Elizabeth Line train to London Bridge. I am not sure I was as convincing as ChatGPT.

I ran the London Marathon in support of the Teenage Cancer Trust – not too late to make a donation.  

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 6 May 2026.

After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop."

— Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media, Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks

Tags: ai-ethics, journalism, ai, google