A glossy professional feed is supposed to showcase real work, real skills, and real ideas. Instead, many users now scroll through a stream of exaggerated “lessons learned,” self-congratulatory career updates, and motivational posts that read as if they were assembled from templates rather than lived experience. The result is a public square for professionals that often feels strangely empty, even when it is crowded.
That emptiness is at the center of a broader concern about what happens when artificial intelligence becomes the default tool for writing, thinking, and presenting ourselves. The argument raised by Pope Leo in Magnifica Humanitas is that AI can threaten human creativity by nudging people toward imitation and convenience instead of originality and craft. When a machine can quickly generate plausible-sounding prose, the temptation grows to publish something “good enough” rather than to do the harder work of saying something true, specific, and earned.
LinkedIn offers a clear illustration of how this shift plays out in daily life. As AI-generated content becomes easier to produce, the platform can fill with low-effort writing that mimics insight without delivering it. Posts may look polished on the surface while conveying little more than vague encouragement, recycled talking points, or generic career morality tales. The feed becomes a showcase of performance rather than competence, and of signaling rather than substance.
From a conservative and libertarian perspective, the problem is not that people are free to speak, market themselves, or use new tools. The issue is what a culture of frictionless automation does to personal responsibility and standards. When professional identity is increasingly curated by prompts and auto-completions, individuals can slide away from accountability for their own words and ideas. In the long run, a society that rewards manufactured sameness over hard-won excellence will find it harder to cultivate genuine talent, sound judgment, and the habits that sustain a free and productive economy.
Magnifica Humanitas’s warning lands because it points to an old truth: creativity is not just output, but a human discipline. Work that matters typically requires attention, risk, and the humility to be wrong before being right. If AI makes it effortless to produce impressive-looking text, it can also make it easier to avoid that discipline. LinkedIn’s increasingly “slop-ridden” content environment, as critics describe it, becomes a practical case study in how quickly convenience can crowd out authenticity—and why calls to defend human creativity are not abstract, but urgently concrete.
