The most hated image type on LinkedIn is also its most effective. The selfie works – and best when it's slightly failed.
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The most hated image type on LinkedIn is also its most effective. The selfie works – and it works best when it is slightly failed.
Feeds are filling up with pictures nobody ever took. Some are ads, some are entirely self-made: illustration generated to accompany an expert post, where a plastic-faced team smiles in a meeting room that does not exist.
A hilarious action figure in its plastic packaging.
A charming pile of curls as ChatGPT's take on what someone would have looked like in the 80s.
Me as an old person / as a dog / as a mafia boss / as whatever the AI sees in me.
The "artists" are amused! But the audience... not that much. When LinkedIn added a report button for AI slop to its feeds in August, it was pressed over a million times in two weeks.
In Bentley University and Gallup's Business in Society 2026 survey, nearly half of respondents felt negatively about AI-made advertising and only one in five positively. The most critical of AI content are the young.
But you can also see the verdict without any research at all.
The comment sections of AI illustrations on Facebook and TikTok fill up with mockery, rage and disappointment, and the warm yellow glow of AI imagery has earned its own nickname: the piss filter.
Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's largest daily, covered the phenomenon in August, and Johanna Frösén, professor of marketing at Aalto University, warned in the piece that a fully AI-made image easily rubs off on the advertiser's reputation.
The more synthetic the feed becomes, the more valuable the picture with a real, living human being behind it!
And still, the expert answers the selfie suggestion with "I just can't" and "it makes me gag a little". What we fear is the greatest sin and shame: making a number of yourself and getting labeled a tyrkky – the Finnish word for someone who pushes themselves forward.
Gag or not, posts with a human face always gather more attention on LinkedIn than plain graphs, logos and stock-photo handshakes – and a rough, slightly off-angle picture often beats the polished, almost too perfect studio portrait.
The reason lies in human psychology.
Newborn babies turn their gaze toward face-like patterns in their first hours of life, and the adult brain has its own specialized region for recognizing faces (the fusiform face area – great pub quiz material). We simply CANNOT not look at faces: they are the oldest and most important content format of our species.
1 – The first reason is our built-in ad radar. Every scroller has learned to recognize a polished surface at a glance: someone is trying to sell something! A shaky selfie does not look like an ad, so it does not get skipped as one.
2 – The second reason is fatigue. Social media curated to the extreme serves up perfect homes, mind-blowing breakfasts and unbelievable careers, and that is exactly what we have grown tired of. The world calls it perfection fatigue; in Finnish, it could be called kiiltokuvaväsymys – glossy-picture fatigue. As a result, the eye craves anything that does not shine – and the double chin becomes a safe harbor.
3 – The third reason is that imperfection is true. Nose hairs or belly rolls are proof that behind the picture is a real person you can relate to.
A good photograph has its place, but in a social feed you do not always have to appear at your best. Authenticity lives in the pictures taken on an ordinary winter Tuesday, when the sun has been gone for months and your skin looks exactly like it.
A classic finding in social psychology is that repeated exposure makes us like things more, and when the same face flashes by in the feed week after week, a sense of familiarity is born.
The same mechanism once worked for Arvi Lind, the longtime anchor of Finland's evening news, who came to be titled the most trusted man in the country – a man whose word was believed more than most ministers'.
Arvi Lind's trust was built over 40 years and more than 10,000 ordinary news broadcasts, not one or two perfect performances.
For an average expert, all of this is of course unpleasant to hear, and many still prefer hiding behind a logo, a chart or a restrained screenshot instead of putting their face on the line.
And it IS safe! That way nobody stops, nobody gets annoyed…. and nobody remembers.
The courage to show your face tired and in bad lighting is not narcissism but a communication strategy unanimously approved by babies, brain researchers and algorithms. A rare consensus.
The people have spoken. They want to see the double chin!
PS. In an experiment by Ipsos and Syracuse University last spring, 3,000 consumers rated ads made by humans and by AI. Hardly anyone could tell the AI versions apart – yet the human-made versions performed 14–17% better. Interesting, that too.
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