How 'Mimetic Signal' Is Destroying Online Platforms Like LinkedIn
AI Has Demoted Humans to Urban Raccoons, Forced to Rummage Through Trash.
Everyone I speak to seems to hate LinkedIn, even people with 300K+ followers on the platform. They all tell me it keeps getting worse and I’m noticing the same.
It’s not just LinkedIn. It’s part of a broader rot I see across most of the content platforms I use.
Every day I scroll through more AI junk that stands in the way of me reading or watching the things I actually like.
How did we reach the point that intelligent people are rummaging through AI garbage every day like urban raccoons to find what they want?
What might we do about it?
This all has happened before. Let’s talk about the California gold rush that happened two centuries ago.
The California Gold Rush
The California gold rush started on January 24, 1848, when gold was discovered by James W. Marshall at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. 300,000 people flocked to California from all over the world after hearing the news.
One of the challenges when mining gold, is that you often stumble upon Pyrite. Pyrite closely resembles gold in every way, except in value. Pyrite is close to worthless. Frequently when miners struck gold, they would disappointingly discover that it was Pyrite after getting it appraised.
Pyrite began being called ‘Fool’s Gold’: something that closely resembles gold, but only a fool would mistake it for gold.
In the animal kingdom, we have a similar kind of deception going on. Consider this insect on a yellow flower:
Imagine it would be flying straight at you while having dinner outside. You’d probably be scared and think it’s a wasp. But it’s actually a harmless hover fly, that only resembles the scary colorations of a wasp.
In the animal kingdom we call this ‘Mimicry’, where a harmless species mimics a dangerous or unpalatable species.
We’ve got exactly the same thing going on the age of AI: I call it Mimetic Signal.
The Age of Mimetic Signal
When we’re doom scrolling, we’re rummaging through noise to extract a meaningful signal. We would like to discover something that interests us. Before the age of AI and ChatGPT, we could visualize it as follows:
There is a high Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), which means we can easily discover our signal of interest. The signal sticks out like a sore thumb and it’s not drowning in a background of noise.
In the age of AI, we have all these people who use AI to create ‘Mimetic Signal’ at scale.
Mimetic Signal is worse than having low Signal-to-Noise ratio. Mimetic signal is a signal that tries to replicate what a signal looks like, without offering the same substance or thinking behind it.
In other words: Mimetic Signal looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waggles like a duck, but it very much is not a duck. Mimetic Signal is not signal, just like our hover fly is not a wasp.
It’s noise trying to mimic signal, hence the name Mimetic Signal.
Another word for Mimetic Signal is HPB: Highly Plausible Bullshit. It’s worse than having a low Signal-to-Noise ratio, as at least the noise isn’t pretending to be signal.
We can easily visualize what happens through a game of the NES game Duck Hunt. Imagine I give you a zapper and ask you to play a game of Duck Hunt. If you never played that game, you must shoot the ducks as they fly up behind the grass.
There are now two kinds of ducks you’re hunting: real ones and fake ones that distract you from scoring points. And some of these fake ducks are extremely hard to distinguish in a flash, thus wasting your time and making you perform worse.
AI is extremely good at taking noise and converting it into something that closely resembles the signal we’re looking to find.
When we’re scrolling LinkedIn the same happens as with Duck Hunt and gold mining. Lots of mimetic ‘Gold Nuggets’ appear in our feed, that upon closer inspection turn out to be ‘Fool’s Gold’, aka Mimetic Signal, and extremely disappointing.
In the past, we were simply scrolling through rocks and gold nuggets. The difference was glaringly obvious.
It’s easy to distinguish a rock and a piece of gold. We could easily discard the bad content to focus on the good content.
Today AI is spit shining all those darn rocks to guarantee we face a daily avalanche of Fool’s Gold.
As the saying goes: all that glistens is not gold, and we’ve got a whole lot of fake glistening going on.
Nowadays we’re mostly busy scrolling through bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit, to discover extremely rare and tiny nuggets of gold.
How do we get rid or reduce Mimetic Signal so we don’t need to rummage through trash like raccoons?
How Do We Reduce Mimetic Signal?
I welcome the fact there are probably more people writing online than ever. However, good content is currently drowning in a sea of Mimetic Signal on the algorithmic platforms.
I expect the following to happen;
Algorithmic platforms (like LinkedIn) will continue to drown in noise. It will only become worse as the quality of the Mimetic Signal increases. Mimetic signal is NOT signal. AI is great at Highly Plausible Bullshitting, and it’s getting better at HPB every day.
Platforms curated by humans will become more popular. The algorithm will serve you ever more and better bull crap. Trusted experts will keep on serving real signal, even if they get help from AI for polishing their writing.
Especially point 1 is extremely important to understand. The higher the quality of the Fool’s Gold, the more difficult it will be to discern these fake gold nuggets from real gold nuggets. The better the quality of the Fool’s Gold, the more we will waste our time on online platforms. AIshittification ensues.
The good news is that people are using online platforms and communities less. Why waste time scrolling through platforms and communities to find AI-generated drivel? Why not cut out the middle man, and talk directly to AI instead? At least then you’re directly dealing with the bullshitter and skipping trash rummaging.
To everyone using AI: keep blasting away with your megaphone. People will move to other platforms where there is less cacophony of AI megaphones drowning out all the meaningful signal. The algorithm will happily keep serving us Mimetic Signal like we’re urban raccoons that must rummage through garbage.
I hate LinkedIn at the moment. I hate being fed so much garbage. I hope they find a way to filter out the Mimetic Signal.
As otherwise, just like with the Californian gold rush, all the miners will leave. And all that we will have left is the people selling shovels.
I hope the age of Mimetic Signal will end soon. But until then, I expect things to only get worse.
AI will get better at producing Mimetic Signal, but we need something better than AI can currently offer: AI that actually understands what it’s saying.
Until AI can do better than Mimetic Intelligence, it can’t filter out Mimetic Signal either.
Add deep fakes into the mix and you have complete destruction of trust. The result is people seeking authenticity and curation. Those that are able to reestablish trust (offering genuine signal amidst the noise) will thrive in an AI-driven world.
True discovery is that quiet joy when you find something real. Not just another thing the algorithm thinks you’ll like, but something that means something. But how can you feel that if you’ve never learned to recognize the difference? If you’ve never gone through the pain of learning, failing, and building true mastery, how would you know the difference between something with soul and something that’s just polished to look right? Life was never meant to be easy and effortless. But that’s exactly what we’re being sold.