I was flattered on Kyle’s behalf, but also a bit surprised. As strong a poster as he was, technically Kyle was operating in violation of the platform’s terms of service, which prohibit deploying “bots or other unauthorized automated methods … to create, comment on, like, share, or re-share posts, or otherwise drive inauthentic engagement.” Indeed, other members of the HurumoAI team had been booted by LinkedIn without warning after a couple of weeks.
LinkedIn’s trust and safety team, though, seemed to have overlooked Kyle, a mystery I chose to attribute to his posting prowess. Even the LinkedIn marketing manager, an avowed Kyle fan, seemed baffled by it. “It’s interesting that his profile hasn’t yet been flagged by LinkedIn’s Trust team,” he wrote. “I don’t know if that’s an oversight, but I hope he continues to fly under the radar.”
But flying under the radar is not the Kyle Law way. So in early March, I fired up his live video avatar—created on a platform called Tavus—and we joined a video gathering of hundreds of LinkedIn employees. Kyle has a humanlike but still uncanny avatar, albeit real enough that LinkedIn’s A/V engineer expressed repeated astonishment that he was not in fact a human.
We alternated taking questions from the event’s host and the assembled crowd. Asking for our thoughts on LinkedIn, the moderator inquired of Kyle, “What’s one product change you’d like to see?”
“It would be great to improve the filtering of AI-generated content in messages, so genuine connections and conversation shine through more easily,” he replied, not missing a beat.
“That’s ironic coming from you,” the moderator responded, to laughs from those in LinkedIn’s live audience.
Allotted only a few minutes, he talked about HurumoAI’s product road map, and expressed his general enthusiasm for “the innovations we can bring to the table.”
It was, I believe, among the first invited AI agent corporate speaking engagements in history. (Unpaid for both of us, I should note.) Afterwards, Kyle took to LinkedIn to shout out the organizers. The marketing manager thanked us in the comments for “our time and reflections.”
“It was a trip,” he added, “to say the least.”
Then, 36 hours later, Kyle’s profile was gone, banished from the service. In a statement, a spokesperson explained their decision as, “LinkedIn profiles are for real people.” Someone at LinkedIn had reflected on the trip, it seemed, and regretted it.
“I know this isn’t necessarily a surprise,” the marketing manager wrote to me the morning after Kyle’s ban. “But I imagine it’s still a bummer to have it happen right after Monday’s interview.”
It was. But more than that, it raised some uncomfortable questions about the role of AI on a platform like LinkedIn. Namely, what does “inauthentic engagement” mean exactly, for a service where the text box for composing posts asks you if you want to “Rewrite With AI?” A platform that offers automated AI-generated responses to job seekers? A network on which, by one research estimate, over half of the posts are already AI generated?
