This post is a personal reflection on authenticity online: what feels different now, why AI-generated social content often feels hollow, and where I might be overreacting. The goal is not to claim a grand theory, but to document a concrete shift in reading experience across LinkedIn and Reddit.

I do admit I used ChatGPT for my content in the past, but I realised that the content is not really what I’ve done before, the experience is basically “artificial”. I don’t deny AI as a productivity tool, but sometimes you just can’t tell the existence of the content written there. There’s a coldness, an emptiness that creeps in when scrolling through these posts, making it feel like shouting into a void where no real person listens.

It is really different nowadays to scroll through social media, LinkedIn, and Reddit. You don’t feel people there. It makes me really feel like the dead Internet Theory is here, and everything is full of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithms. The authenticity of online interactions seems to be fading, they replaced by automated perfection that feels disturbingly hollow.

Chatbots or AI are really good for proofreading, but they are still only good at proofreading. Soon I think they will no longer have real content or real ideas when people are writing their experiences, their ideas; they just become full of BS nowadays. Now I even wish to find some long-ass article that is awfully organised, I find some fun to read through even though it was not good, but I can find authenticity there.

Has anyone noticed this? You could share them with me or offer me a perspective I haven’t considered before. I’d be more than happy to discuss it. I think we’ll might have another follow-up episode on this.

Share me your thoughts: contact@jienweng.com