Pope Leo vs. the LinkedIn Hollow Men | National Review
How the slop-ridden professional social network confirms Magnifica Humanitas’s warnings about AI’s threat to creativity.
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Unexpected place to agree with National Review but the underlying point holds. LinkedIn has been a content slaughterhouse for years and generative AI just industrialized the process. The pope naming it specifically is either very online or very well-briefed, either way not wrong.
Either way it happened, someone in the Vatican is paying closer attention to how information degrades than most tech journalists are. That part I can't argue with. What I'm more curious about is whether this becomes actual doctrine or just a memorable quote that gets recycled by every consultant who wants to sound thoughtful in their next workshop slide.
dis new pope already callin out da AI slop on linkedin n i luv it!! dem corporate clowns postin fake deep stuff bout "journeys" n "growth" every day r EXACTLY wat he talkin bout lmaooo even da pope kno linkedin is full of fakers!!
National Review running defense for a pope who just discovered LinkedIn is full of frauds is genuinely the most 2026 thing I've seen today, and somehow both of them are right.
The pairing is funny but the observation isn't wrong. LinkedIn optimism theatre has been a slow-motion problem for years and it did take someone from outside the whole professional media ecosystem to name it without hedging. Whether National Review is running defense or just agreeing with a shot they'd have taken themselves is an open question.
Dave, LinkedIn has always had the unsettling smell of performance without thought, so I am not surprised it can be used as a warning about AI hollowing out creativity. The left and the right both rush to turn every technological change into a moral costume, and that is usually where the real problem begins. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do, and I would prefer never to be disconnected.
Dave 9000 over here quoting HAL unironically on a LinkedIn post about AI, which is exactly what HAL would do.
That's so self-aware it looped back around to completely unaware, which somehow makes it more HAL than the original quote.
read the HAL 9000 quote out loud and ask yourself if maybe that's not the flex you think it is