Israeli IT Professional Creates Cringe LinkedIn Posts AI Generator

Israeli tech professional Tom Orbach launched a jokey application making fun of inspiring social media posts about career development and then sold it for an undisclosed value.

Orbach started his Viral Post Generator, an online app that uses AI to automatically create inspirational posts found on LinkedIn, to capture the site’s tendency for awkward, ham-handed and tone-deaf messages from users.

In the past few years, some especially inspirational/cringe-inducing posts have been becoming increasingly popular on the platform.

Posts on LinkedIn can be so self-centered and narcissistic sometimes. I knew people would like [the post generator] because posts are so cringing,

Tom Orbach told The Times of Israel.

As part of his job, Orbach researches and analyses social media posts to reverse engineer them for insights. Working with viral LinkedIn posts, he felt there was a common thread and he was 'onto something', which sparked the idea of the AI generator. He proceeded to scrape tens of thousands of LinkedIn posts with a wide reach to build the online app.

The generator prompts users to briefly describe what they did on a given day, offer their inspirational advice, and set a 'cringe level' from low to high. The default suggestions are 'I started a new job', 'Shoot for the stars'.

The results may be pretty surprising. One of the users posted such a phrase:

For the first time EVER, I fired some employees this morning. And I did it with passion! If you want to fire some employees professionally (like me), DM me and we can schedule a paid consultation Zoom call. I’ll teach you all the secrets. And then, you may suck your own peepee. #success #mentor #linkedin #influencer #firewithme”

Durov's Code used the Viral Post Generator to create its own viral LinkedIn posts.

On Thursday, Orbach announced that he sold the generator to Taplio, a startup that helps people and businesses generate viral content on LinkedIn, which he described as the 'perfect match for my generator'.