LinkedIn realizes its users have been bathing in AI slop, offers a shower

LinkedIn has been drenching its users in AI-powered slop posts, going so far as to encourage writers to trade their own voices for a bot's by hitting the "enhance your post" button when they want to share thoughts. Enough is enough. On Thursday, the site’s Chief Product Officer has announced several changes designed to rehab the platform’s reputation. CPO Hari Srinivasan took to the Microsoft-owned social network following reports Thursday that LinkedIn had introduced a button for users to flag posts as AI slop. He confirmed not only that the reports are real, but that LinkedIn had additional plans as well. The “Seems like AI slop” button is being added to the ellipsis menu on LinkedIn posts now, a spokesperson told us, and will be available on all posts and comments. Srinivasan said this button will not only allow users to report posts with sentences written like this – it will also help LinkedIn refine its AI-spotting AI models to help improve user feeds. In addition, the "enhance your post" button, which used AI to tweak your wording, is being replaced by an option to have AI proofread your work while leaving your voice intact, instead of stealing it like the sea witch Ursula. There’s been no shortage of scorn from The Register and elsewhere about LinkedIn’s rapid decline into a slop tank filled with faux thought leadership posts and generative drivel. As far back as 2024, reports were coming out that more than half of long-form LinkedIn posts longer than 100 words were believed to be AI generated. That hasn’t changed in the past two years. “AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this,” Srinivasan wrote. “People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives,” he said, adding that LinkedIn wants to keep it that way – or, more realistically, nudge the platform back toward its former state. Coincidentally or not, Originality.ai, the same AI detection site behind the 2024 report, released an updated scan of LinkedIn posts longer than 100 words on Thursday. According to this new report, a full 81 percent of the 5,000 posts it looked at this month were classified as likely being AI-generated. Srinivasan said it's not just users employing AI to generate slop – it's AI automating garbage posts and comments at scale, throughout the site. “Everyday we are now catching hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts, and have blocked billions of other automation attempts (posting at scale, slop) in the last couple months alone,” the LinkedIn CPO said. To that end, the professional social network is also “ramping up a series of new and improved classifiers that identify if a post is AI-slop or generally low-quality content,” Srinivasan said. User analytics dashboards will also be getting a new feature that will tell posters when members flag their posts as potentially being AI, as Srinivasan said LinkedIn wants users “to get feedback from real humans on what sounds authentic – not just have an AI detector review it and get it wrong.” “AI and slop are not the same thing,” Srinivasan added. “Many people refine thoughts with AI, and we believe they want to know when they sound inauthentic.” ®