In this photo illustration the logo of LinkedIn can be seen on a smartphone on March 10, 2022 in Berlin, Germany.
Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images
LinkedIn posts can be cringey sometimes.
A new AI tool called Viral Post Generator pokes fun at LinkedIn’s most popular posts, creating uber-enthusiastic, self-congratulatory posts from even the most mundane tasks.
Its creator, Tom Orbach, says he made it “partly for humor and partly as a criticism of the self-obsessed culture on LinkedIn.”
If you’ve ever used LinkedIn, you know it can be cringey sometimes.
Occasionally, that means aspiring thought leaders trying to wring profound nuggets of career wisdom out of everyday interactions. Other times, it’s LinkedIn influencers dishing out advice that’ll apparently transform your life and fix all of your problems. Recently, it was a CEO posting a selfie of himself crying after laying off staff. Whatever it is, LinkedIn is full of these kinds of fantastical motivational posts.
Enter the Viral Post Generator. This AI tool has been making the rounds online this week as people make fun of the bad LinkedIn posts we’ve all seen. It works like this: You type in an activity and a clichéd piece of inspirational advice, and it’ll churn out a cringy inspirational LinkedIn post for you.
As an example, here’s how mine came out. I entered “I woke up” as my activity for the day, and “Aim high” as my corny advice.
Viral Post Generator
Viral Post Generator
The Viral Post Generator was created by Tom Orbach, growth marketing manager at Israeli privacy tech startup Mine. He scraped more than 100,000 of LinkedIn’s most successful posts to create the parody tool.
“All of these successful posts on LinkedIn had one thing in common: they were all self-centered, even a bit narcissistic,” he said. “I took an insight that everyone secretly agrees upon and I just made it public.”
Orbach first made the Viral Post Generator in Hebrew. After seeing it take off, he replicated it in English.
“Everybody knows which posts on LinkedIn go viral,” he said. “I made it partly for humor and partly as a criticism of the self-obsessed culture on LinkedIn.”
Don’t get him wrong, though — he’s still a fan of LinkedIn.
“It’s my favorite social network, and I like how positive it is, but it’s just too cringy from time to time,” Orbach said. “I just think that people should be more real and authentic and think of themselves less as thought leaders and more as colleagues.”
He continued: “The posts that go viral are usually narcissistic ones, but it doesn’t have to be that way.”