There have been and always will be people who try to game the system, but the truth inevitably comes out.

It’s nothing new for digital marketing agencies to take over the responsibility of a supermarket’s Instagram account or an accounting firm’s newsletter. However, the careful and perfect curation of one’s own digital presence, CaaS (curation as a service), is a relatively recent development that seems to have bombed out in spectacular fashion.

Initially, firms like Repu and Best Foot Forward co-created someone’s digital presence, with them, and also used machine learning and predictive analytics to learn from past posting behaviour. The client was then given a subset of content pieces which they had to ‘OK’, before it would go online.

This back and forth was taking too much time, especially for those people who wanted to offload the whole online management process in the first place. More clandestine curation agencies have been popping up in the last few months. The client simply has to fill in an online form, saying what purpose their online life should serve: visa submission, job application, dating site and so on. The service then creates digital identities and personas without any direct, personal input, which sounds smart, but was never a clever idea.

Andrew McGee’s story has been trending since Wednesday. He was fired from his job at structural engineering firm Strongland, after his boss asked him about the supposed ‘insightful chat’ he had with the dean of the Stanford School of Engineering. Turns out it was all fabricated, and the words of wisdom that were posted on his LinkedIn page, were all copied from a news article. Talk about burning your bridges!

Artificial intelligence is smart, but if it sounds artificial, it probably is! Honesty remains the best policy and integrity the most valuable trait of all – if you value your career, that is.