LinkedIn users really are the product when it comes to training AI for Microsoft’s work-focused social media platform.
There’s an old saying with social media: the users are the product. That used to mean that if you posted on a service like Reddit, then your data would be sold to advertisers, either individually or in aggregate. That has only become more true with the advent of AI, as companies race to acquire the data necessary to train models. Microsoft’s career-oriented LinkedIn has joined its more consumer-focused rivals, but for existing users it seems that the only way to win this game is not to play.
The trouble is that according to multiple reports, LinkedIn had actually started training its generative AI models on existing user data prior to introducing a form to opt out option in the service’s Settings page, which is defaulted to opting users in. Perhaps even more troubling is that LinkedIn started training those models before introducing the setting at all and apparently without updating the terns of service.
