LinkedIn is taking a strong stance against the proliferation of low-quality, AI-generated content, commonly referred to as "AI slop," cluttering its platform. On Thursday, the social networking site announced the introduction of a new button that allows users to flag posts as resembling AI-generated material whenever they encounter such content.
This initiative aligns with a growing trend among digital content platforms aimed at reducing the prevalence of AI-created posts. Increasingly, users are expressing their dissatisfaction with the insincere, automated writing that has become commonplace online.
Recently, Substack, a newsletter platform, unveiled a feature enabling users to discern whether the articles they read are authored by AI, collaborating with Pangram for this purpose. Pangram has also secured $9 million in funding to help mitigate the issues surrounding the influx of AI content on the internet. Additionally, the effects of this phenomenon have been felt by emerging companies; for example, Digg was forced to close its Reddit rival in March due to the overwhelming number of bots inundating its platform.
Cloudflare, a provider of internet infrastructure, reports that the situation is deteriorating, noting that bot traffic now surpasses human-generated requests—an alarming milestone reached more swiftly than anticipated.
In a LinkedIn post, Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan acknowledged the challenges faced by the Microsoft-owned platform. “AI slop is a major concern for all of us. We genuinely care about this. Users come to LinkedIn to connect with real individuals and share authentic perspectives, ideas, and expertise,” he remarked.
Srinivasan elaborated that the newly introduced “Seems like AI slop” button is part of a comprehensive strategy LinkedIn is implementing to curb the amount of subpar, AI-generated content on its site. The company is also enhancing its defenses against automation, currently blocking “hundreds of thousands” of automated comments on a daily basis, alongside millions of additional automation attempts within the last few months.
To further address the issue, LinkedIn is rolling out new classifiers designed to determine whether a post qualifies as AI slop or other forms of low-quality content, thereby minimizing the visibility of such posts in recommendations outside one's network. This button will also provide valuable data that can enhance LinkedIn's AI models in identifying undesired content.
Moreover, the platform plans to privately notify users if their posts are perceived as inauthentic due to excessive reliance on AI. This aims to support users in honing their writing skills, particularly for those utilizing AI to refine their work rather than producing complete “slop.”
Significantly, LinkedIn is discontinuing its “enhance your post” feature, which leveraged AI for writing assistance, in favor of a tool that offers proofreading without altering the user's unique voice.
In addition to these changes, the company is expanding availability of profile and page verification features and allowing users to block comments from company pages they wish to mute, as mentioned by Srinivasan.
