LinkedIn is rolling out new tools to curb low‑quality, AI‑generated posts — commonly called “AI slop” — that are increasingly appearing in users’ feeds. The Microsoft‑owned professional network announced on Thursday that it is introducing a “Seems like AI slop” button users can click when a post appears to be written or heavily influenced by artificial intelligence.
Why LinkedIn is acting
Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s Chief Product Officer, acknowledged the issue in a LinkedIn post: “AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this. People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas, and expertise.” The company said it wants to protect authentic professional conversation by reducing the visibility of computer‑generated, low‑value content.
Measures being deployed
- The “Seems like AI slop” button: users’ reports will provide signal data to help LinkedIn’s models learn to detect AI‑generated or inauthentic posts.
- New classifiers: LinkedIn is introducing classifiers to identify AI slop and other low‑quality content so such posts are shown less frequently in suggested content, particularly recommendations from outside a user’s network.
- Automation defenses: the company says it blocks “hundreds of thousands” of automated comment attempts every day and has stopped millions of other automation attempts in the past couple of months.
- Private flags for authors: LinkedIn will privately flag in a user’s dashboard when others perceive their content as inauthentic due to heavy AI use, giving authors a chance to revise if they were using AI to polish rather than produce outright low‑quality posts.
- Removal of the “enhance your post” feature: LinkedIn is retiring its AI‑based post enhancement tool and replacing it with a proofreading feature that corrects grammar and spelling without changing the author’s voice.
- Additional steps: the company is expanding access to profile and page verification tools and adding an option to block comments from company pages users no longer want to see.
Broader context
LinkedIn’s actions follow a wider push among platforms to limit AI‑generated noise. Last week, Substack added a tool developed with Pangram to help users identify when content on its site was produced by AI. Pangram itself announced $9 million in new funding this week to address problems caused by AI content flooding the internet. Earlier, Digg shut down its Reddit competitor in March, citing an inability to control the number of bots overwhelming its site. Cloudflare has also warned that bot traffic now exceeds human‑generated requests online, a milestone reached sooner than it had predicted.
What this means for users
LinkedIn says these combined measures should reduce the visibility of low‑quality AI content, improve the relevance of suggested posts, and help maintain authentic professional interactions. The new reporting button and classifier signals are intended to help the network fine‑tune its detection models; LinkedIn said it will provide further details and updates as it refines these systems.
