Read on Twitter
Meet Keenan Ramsey. Her LinkedIn profile says she sells software for RingCentral & has a business degree from NYU. She likes CNN, Amazon, & Melinda French Gates. Her pitches come punctuated with emojis.
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/27/1088140809/fake-linkedin-profiles
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/27/1088140809/fake-linkedin-profiles
But…RingCentral doesn’t have any record of an employee named Keenan Ramsey. NYU says no one named Keenan Ramsey has received any undergraduate degree.
And the biggest red flag? Her face appears to have been created by artificial intelligence.
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/27/1088140809/fake-linkedin-profiles
And the biggest red flag? Her face appears to have been created by artificial intelligence.
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/27/1088140809/fake-linkedin-profiles
Welcome to the latest LinkedIn marketing tactic: using AI-generated faces to drum up sales.
A tool used to spread disinformation has come to the corporate world. Stanford’s @noUpside & @JoshAGoldstein found >1,000 profiles with seemingly fake faces: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/27/1088140809/fake-linkedin-profiles
A tool used to spread disinformation has come to the corporate world. Stanford’s @noUpside & @JoshAGoldstein found >1,000 profiles with seemingly fake faces: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/27/1088140809/fake-linkedin-profiles
More than 70 businesses were listed as employers on these apparently fake profiles. RingCentral & several others told me they had hired outside marketers to help with sales – but hadn't authorized any use of computer-generated images.
We came across a bunch of companies that sell LinkedIn marketing services. Some even explicitly offer bot or “avatar” accounts – which go against LinkedIn’s rules that accounts are supposed to represent real people, with real photos.
Here’s one: a company called LIA, based in India. For $300 a month, LIA customers can pick one "AI-generated avatar" from hundreds that are "ready-to-use," according to its website, which was recently scrubbed of all information except its logo.
Most of these firms didn’t respond to me. One said they work w freelancers who might create LI profiles but the firm isn’t involved. Another said they'd tested AI images but stopped. NPR couldn’t verify who created the profiles/images Stanford found or anyone who authorized them
So why did whoever made these fake profiles bother? From a business perspective, setting up social media accounts with computer-generated faces has its advantages: It's cheaper than hiring multiple people to create accounts & you can’t reverse search the images…
Plus these images are *really* convincing. A recent study by @sjnightingale7 & Hany Farid found AI-generated faces are “indistinguishable” from the real thing —and ppl find them slightly more trustworthy (!) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2120481119
Given that, it’s funny this whole story came about bcs that Keenan Ramsey profile sent a LinkedIn message to @noUpside — one of the few people who CAN spot the telltale signs of an AI-generated image.
"The face jumped out at me as being fake," she says. https://www.npr.org/2022/03/27/1088140809/fake-linkedin-profiles
"The face jumped out at me as being fake," she says. https://www.npr.org/2022/03/27/1088140809/fake-linkedin-profiles
LinkedIn has removed most of the profiles Stanford found and says it’s constantly updating its defenses to catch fake accounts – including those using computer-generated images.
My story just scratches the surface of a new evolution in fake accounts. If you work at a company that’s used AI-gen faces for sales (or anything else!), or a company that sells LinkedIn marketing services, I’d love to hear from you. DMs are open. https://www.npr.org/2022/03/27/1088140809/fake-linkedin-profiles
