How to Turn Off (or Avoid) LinkedIn's AI Features
Like it or not, LinkedIn is still one of the best ways to search for jobs online. But since 2023, the site has been experimenting with generative AI, making it possible to get AI help with finding new jobs, writing messages, connecting with others, and building your profile and job descriptions. Some users are even seeing AI prompts showing up under every post.
While posed as helpful, that kind of AI integration can get intrusive fast, as evidenced by comments asking how to turn LinkedIn’s AI off under posts advertising it. If you’d rather keep your online recruitment and job searches as human-powered as possible, here’s a quick breakdown of LinkedIn’s AI features and which ones you can turn off.
Wait, why doesn’t my LinkedIn have AI?
LinkedIn’s AI integration is pretty ubiquitous across the site, but there’s a catch: it’s reserved for Premium users. That means free users don’t have to lift a finger if they want to skip AI on LinkedIn. They’ll still see the occasional ad recommending they buy Premium to access a certain AI feature, but Premium ads aren’t exactly a new thing for LinkedIn.
If you do pay for Premium, your AI integration is going to be a bit harder to ignore–LinkedIn considers it part of your subscription, so it’s not going to want you to turn off these paid features.
LinkedIn currently uses AI in jobs pages, its recruiter tools, under posts, and in most text boxes. Some but not all of these can be turned off, and more annoyingly, the AI features you have access to differs across Premium tiers.
Where does LinkedIn use AI?
There are four areas where LinkedIn’s AI integration is most prevalent. The first is on job listings.
With the Career tier of Premium, which I signed up for a free trial of while writing this article, job listings will now show prompts for LinkedIn’s AI chatbot underneath the job description. These include questions like “Am I a good fit for this job?” and “How can I best position myself for the job?” Answers to these usually read like summaries of either your job profile or the job description, while “Tell me more about [employer]” largely summarizes the company’s LinkedIn page.
The second is in LinkedIn Recruiter, where users can run AI-assisted candidate searches, get help filling out fields in projects, and send AI-assisted messages. These features require an enterprise level LinkedIn Recruiter subscription, so I wasn’t able to test them for this article. Note that LinkedIn Premium's Recruiter Lite tier does not get access to these tools.
Premium users will also find AI in most of LinkedIn’s text boxes as well as on their profile. Here, LinkedIn will offer to help draft messages, posts, your profile’s headline or about pages. An odd quirk: Sales Navigator Core and Recruiter Lite packages, despite their higher cost compared to the Career and Business tiers, do not have access to AI message drafts.
Perhaps the most visible of LinkedIn’s AI features are the “AI takeaways on feed posts.” On occasion, these will show up next to sparkle icons while browsing your feed, and will suggest questions related to the post. Clicking on them will open LinkedIn's AI chatbot and ask the question.
How to Turn off LinkedIn AI
The bad news is that most of LinkedIn’s AI features can’t be toggled off, so your best bet is to only sign up for the Premium tier with the features you want. A short list of available AI features is visible when signing up. Once you’ve signed up, you can double check which AI features you have access to by clicking the “See your Premium features” tab in the site’s top-left corner.
That said, there are a couple of steps you can take to make AI less prevalent on your feed. The most direct way to disable LinkedIn AI is in LinkedIn recruiter, where the ability to send AI-assisted messages can be turned off on both an admin and seat level.
To turn off AI-assisted messages in LinkedIn Recruiter’s admin tools, hover over your profile on your Recruiter homepage and click Product Settings. Navigate to Company Settings > Preferences in the left rail and click Edit under Enable AI-assisted message auto-draft. Toggle AI-assisted messages Off and click save.
To turn off AI-assisted messages on Recruiter’s seat level, hover over your profile on your Recruiter homepage, select Product Setting from the dropdown menu, then click Messaging under My Account settings on the left rail. Click Edit under Enable AI-assisted auto-draft, toggle the feature off, and click Save.
All other users can easily ignore LinkedIn’s AI-assisted messages, even if they can’t outright disable them. That’s because AI messages are currently only visible when clicking Message either in the Meet the hiring team section of the jobs page or in the introduction section of another user’s profile. Messages made via the Messaging window in the bottom-right corner will not show the Write with AI prompt.
Sadly, there is no way to keep the Write with AI prompt from appearing when writing a new post or editing your profile, so it’s important to know what it looks like to avoid accidentally clicking into it.
When editing your profile's Headline or About section, the Write with AI box will appear underneath your text box with a gold sparkle next to it and a Premium tag to the right. Avoid clicking it to keep from using the AI, but don’t worry if you do accidentally click it. If you don’t like what the AI has suggested, you can click the Revert button to undo its changes and the Thumbs Down button to mark the suggestion as bad.
It’s a bit easier to ignore AI integration on LinkedIn posts, as the Rewrite with AI button will be grayed out until you’ve already written a few lines of text. If you do accidentally click it, click the Undo button to get rid of the changes to your text. You’ll also still be able to give the AI-rewrite either a thumbs up or thumbs down.
As for the AI prompts on job listings or the AI takeaways on posts in your feed? The best way to avoid them is simply to not sign up for Premium.
* This article was originally published here
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