They say to be cringe is to be free. And on LinkedIn, I needed a taste of freedom. Which is why I fully embraced using Cringebot 3000, a website that creates purposely grating AI-generated slop for you to post to LinkedIn.
Why on Earth would you want that? That’s the wrong question. The better one is: How did we get to this point?
Cringebot 3000 is the unholy creation of Peter Epstein, who runs a Los Angeles-based PR firm for advertising industry clients. After the website blew up on Reddit and the influential Hacker News site this week, I caught up with him over the phone to find out what kind of twisted mind would aspire to be the Oppenheimer of LinkedIn slop.
“The goal is to make it a little less serious and try to take what’s become its own sort of form, like poetry — LinkedIn ‘thought leadership’ is its own form — and try to take that form and make it a little more fun and a little more silly,” he explained.
He wanted to try vibecoding something with Claude, and first created the site at the beginning of this year, but only more recently fine-tuned it to be reliable at mass-producing this kind of slop at scale.
LinkedIn has an AI slop problem and I’m not helping
LinkedIn has long had a problem with cheesiness and people posting purposely engagement-baiting posts. It’s been almost a decade since we witnessed the terrifying birth of a new posting form known as “broetry” — posts where:
They use line breaks for every sentence. And the content is something like What potty training my toddler taught me about 2b2 SaaS sales.
The ability to use AI to write this kind of stuff has turned LinkedIn into a real slophouse. LinkedIn is well aware and trying to fight it: it recently added a feature where you can report a post for “AI slop” the same way you might for harassment or spam.
“People complain about LinkedIn AI slop, but was LinkedIn that great before AI slop?” Epstein pointed out.
Partly because of this kind of content, I haven’t found LinkedIn to be a “fun” place to post. But the tantalizing idea of becoming a LinkedInfluencer now dangled before me, warm and weightless. I needed to shake the shackles of caring about “good” posts or “seeming human” and plunge into the deep end of the slop pool.
Now sure, I could use any LLM to come up with some quasi-inspirational business wisdom pablum to post on LinkedIn. But Cringebot 3000 makes it even easier. Just type in a topic — could be a single word, and then select from eight separate flavors, such as “The Vulnerability Post (oversharing with a motivational twist)”, “The Inspiring Story (finding life lessons everywhere)”or “The Corporate Dropout (quit the 9-5 to follow my passion)”.
I typed in “AI in journalism” as my topic and chose “You Go Girl! (empowerment culture and smashing glass ceilings)” for the style.
The output was perfect LinkedIn slop: a meandering story with a grippy opening sentence and a corny kernel of truth at the end. It was loaded with hashtags (and a disclaimer at the very bottom that it was written by Cringebot 3000).
Here’s the text (you can skim it):
Okay so I need to tell you all something that happened to me last Tuesday that I am still not fully recovered from. I was pitching a story to my editor about AI writing tools replacing journalists, and I accidentally sent the draft that my AI assistant had written ABOUT ME to the entire newsroom listserv.
The AI had described me as “a mid-level content facilitator with moderate narrative instincts.”
Moderate. Narrative. Instincts.
I cried in the bathroom for eleven minutes.
But here is what happened next, and this is the part that matters.
Every woman in that newsroom replied-all within twenty minutes. Not to laugh. To share their own AI horror stories. The investigative reporter whose AI fact-checker confidently cited a country that no longer exists. The foreign correspondent whose translation bot rendered her entire interview in the subjunctive mood. The editor whose AI headline generator called a piece about the Supreme Court “a fun romp.”
We built something that afternoon in that reply-all thread that no algorithm could have generated.
We built a coalition of women who refuse to let machines define our narrative instincts, moderate or otherwise.
The AI didn’t replace us. It accidentally introduced us to each other.
Now we have a weekly meeting. We are rewriting the rules of how women in journalism engage with these tools, on our terms, with our voices, telling our stories.
The AI called me moderate.
The sisterhood said: absolutely not.
#WomenInJournalism #AIInJournalism #MediaInnovation #WomenSupportingWomen #JournalismTwitter #TechAndMedia #GlassCeilingSmashed #SisterhoodIsPowerful #OwnYourNarrative #cringebot3000
This post was generated with tongue firmly in cheek by LinkedIn CringeBot 3000. (link in comments)
Awful, right? I immediately copy and pasted it to my LinkedIn and let that sweet, sweet engagement roll in.
The reaction was mixed. People who knew me well recognized it was an AI-generated joke.
But according to LinkedIn’s analytics of the reach of my post, 96% of viewers were people not in my network — strangers who didn’t know this is would be highly out of character for me to write. I started seeing some comments from strangers as if this was a genuine anecdote about the workplace.
Oh no, what have I done
“I love this so much! Way to hold each other up and take control of the literal narrative!” commented someone I didn’t know.
To make things worse, the post itself was a rousing success by LinkedIn standards. I got far more engagement and comments on this than I have for any of my other recent posts with links to articles I wrote or other career news.
Basically, the Cringebot3000 is way better at LinkedIn than I am.
Like a true LinkedIn Thought Leader, I am choosing to learn from my failures. Whatever shriveled shred of humanity that still flickers inside me that normally prevents me from posting garbage on LinkedIn is something I should treasure, not be ashamed of. No more AI slop for me. Well, unless Cringebot4000 comes out.
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