A little while ago I experienced something that seemed to so closely mirror what it’s like on this hellsite [LinkedIn, affectionate, sometimes] that I had to share.
As many of you know, I have a love-hate relationship with LinkedIn. I have a profile and keep it updated so that I can follow you wonderful and nerdy souls and so potential employers and clients can get an easy overview of my professional background. But as a femme-presenting person in Tech, boy is the day-to-day experience of being on here a challenge.
Like many of us, I’m looking for work, and I’m choosing to frame this positively, as embarking on a new phase in my career. I need new headshots, but again like many of us, I’m on a budget. I decided to try a few of the AI headshot services some friends recommended: Try It On AI and Secta AI (the latter is a referral link - I get nothing for it but you’ll get extra headshots if you decide to try it). With the former I received 100 headshots to choose from, and from the latter over 400.
What I got was surprising in a few ways. First, I got some extra arms!
Disappearing hands!
Earrings and scarves and various accessories appearing as if from nowhere!
Oh god, the teeth in shots of me smiling - the teeth that a friend described as looking like I’d borrowed them from someone else. It was (and is) fabulous entertainment. If nothing else, the $17 and $25 respectively were worth it just for the hilarity that ensued.
Secondly, I got myself. That was a surprise. What I see in a fair number of these headshots is undeniably me, even if it’s my face on someone else’s body, making poses I’ve never made, in clothes I’ve never worn, wearing makeup I’ve never touched, surrounded by places and settings I’ve never stepped foot in.
As someone who hates looking at pictures of themself, being confronted with so many different variations of my face wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.
In fact, seeing how AI enhanced and exaggerated certain features in different ways, I’ve strangely begun to appreciate features I’ve long dismissed as just okay - my dark eyes, my rounded cheeks, my dimples, my big, crooked nose. Altogether, they make a fine enough face, and it’s a surprise at 37 to finally be able to acknowledge that.
Except when it wasn’t me, but only by little, hard-to-pinpoint differences. That was an unpleasant feeling, being trapped in my own personal uncanny valley, not exactly sure how I got there or what to do to get out.
But it was the final surprise in which I found the most interesting and unsettling parallel to the LinkedIn experience: the longer I spent moving through the headshots, picking my favorites, the more I forgot what I looked like. With every passing photo, what I looked like got a little fuzzier, a little more aspirational, a little more what maybe I could, should, would look like if I worked a little harder, hustled a little more.
Sound familiar? It does to me.
Scrolling through the feed on LinkedIn is like scrolling through hundreds of AI-generated images of yourself – you know most of what you see isn’t really real, but it’s so convincing that the longer you do it, the fuzzier things get.
Most people here are understandably trying to reach for the next opportunity, hustling hard, sometimes transparently (and/or desperately) attempting thought leadership.[1]
But the longer you scroll, the easier it is to forget what’s real and what’s aspirational.
It’s not that aspiration is bad, per se, it’s that prolonged exposure to nothing but artifice does a hell of a number on your sense of self. You lose sight of the things that make you you, the flawed, unique person who’s skilled in real, concrete work that has very little to do with convincing people you’ll never meet of an ideal that has never and will never exist.
You could argue that this is true on any social media platform, and I wouldn’t disagree, but doesn’t it hit harder on a platform built literally for competing with others in the pursuit of a decent livelihood?
Starting today, I’m conducting– let’s call it performance art (pun intended). Every day I’ll be changing my LinkedIn profile pic to one of the ones generated for me by AI. I’m not screening out the goofs and what goes up may look like me, or a version of me, or maybe someone the AI thought was a more ideal me.
The only way you’ll know whether you’re looking at the real me is to, well, look at the real me - through a video call or maybe even a face-to-face meet up. If you’re a future employer or client, I hope you’ll see this performance as an expression of my values: what’s on LinkedIn is just a snapshot of who any of us are; real, meaningful, human connections are what matter, always.
file under: LinkedIn, AI, I am a serious professional
Whenever I read or hear the term ‘thought leadership’ I think of a handsome pied piper in his little polo shirt, leading little professionally-dressed ideas to their doom.↩︎
