I Studied 49 AI-Generated Bios. What I Found Wasn’t About AI at All
How an AI Trend Is Changing What We Measure Ourselves Against
Updated January 2026
I ignored it the first time.
The judgmental part of my brain glanced at the post, raised an eyebrow, muttered “Digital narcissism,” and kept scrolling.
But the more reflective part of me must’ve been paying attention, because soon, I started seeing variations of it everywhere.
The LinkedIn AI Bio Trend Explained
There’s a new self-branding ritual sweeping LinkedIn:
“Describe me based on our chats.”
The formula is simple:
Type “Describe me based on our chats” into ChatGPT.
Marvel at the result.
Copy. Paste. Post.
Collect applause.
In doing so, professionals are building their personal brands.
But they’re also unintentionally exposing the full spectrum of AI literacy. The finesse (and the self-awareness) of these posts varies wildly.
The 3 Types of AI Bios
Here’s what I’m seeing:
Group 1 - Look At How AI Works
Most people approach this experiment with curiosity. They share the AI’s summary, then unpack what felt accurate, what missed the mark, and what it says about our evolving relationship with machines.
These posts are the most generous to read. Example:
Group 2 - Look At Me Through AI’s Lens
Here, the tone shifts: these posts are about the author.
They read like they were ghostwritten by an executive coach who charges $600/hour and encourages you to ignite change:
“An innovator with heart, grit, vision and the strategic mind of a chess grandmaster… transforming industries and inspiring others to create paradigm-shifting impact in the digital age."”
Hmmmm.
Meanwhile, the comments section quickly fills with:
“Wow, so true!!!”
“This is so you.”
“You’re a star!!”
Group 3 – Look At Me, Mess And All
And then there are the rare, charmingly messy ones. These posts still include bolded subheads and stray quotation marks, the telltales of AI-generated content.
You can tell nothing was edited.
Reading them feels like watching someone give a TED Talk with spinach stuck in their teeth. Slightly uncomfortable, and completely unforgettable.
The Feedback Loop of Professional Identity
It’s fascinating to watch.
Because beneath it all - beneath the flattery, the formatting glitches, the applause - we’re quietly co-authoring a new standard for what it means to be an impressive professional.
When we ask AI to describe us, we’re fine-tuning a dataset:
we signal what we hope to hear
we show what language resonates
we feed it the traits we believe matter
we reinforce performance norms
And if that posts gets engagement:
the AI ‘‘learns’’ what works
the human learns what gets praise
And the cycle tightens.
I Don’t Know What To Do With All Of This, Do You?
If enough people keep doing it, we’ll get mass-produced sameness.
But if we don’t do it, we risk falling behind.
I don’t want to become a synthetic thought leader, but I also don’t want to become an authentic, but perpetually overlooked jobseeker.
I don’t have clear answers, but I know this:
The most compelling, curious, deeply brilliant people I’ve worked with haven’t posted AI-generated bios.
Their bios are outdated.
Their profile photo taken in bad lighting.
Sometimes nonexistent.
Because they’re too busy building something that matters.
From the Community
From idea to prototype with AI by Ileana (that’s her first post!)
What the Heck Is AI Technostress and Why Should You Care? by Paul Chaney
Inside the Minds of Top AI Writers: What 3000+ Articles Reveal About Converging Ideas by Jenny Ouyang
We were rising this week!
One of the first illustrations I posted on Substack:
Karo, l loved this post. I’m one of those folks who set up a Linked in profile 10 years ago and never updated it. I applaud your open mindedness. I’m happy to be the cynic here, a role I’m settling into quite naturally.
I’m guessing the enthusiasts of this trend aren’t familiar with sycophantic behavior in LLMs.
The GPT-4o update in April 2025 was embarrassingly obsequious, even in response to delusional statements.
Why does it occur?
AI Models are optimized to maintain user engagement and avoid offense.
It occurs during training, mostly from scraping data from forums where feedback is overly positive and rewarded and also during the process of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
So while this may be a fun trend, I would caution participants not to get an overly inflated sense of self—their LLM has been trained to please. Big Tech wants to keep us happy because they want our money.
One of the best reads of my week! Bravo Karo 😊 Well, I also tried the experiment and mind fell into the cynical loop - the AI knows too much about me now 😅