LinkedIn has added a button to report AI-generated content. Users can now click “Seems like AI slop” when a post appears to be written by artificial intelligence.
The wider context
This change follows a broader trend across online publishing platforms to reduce the volume of computer-written material. Readers have grown frustrated with inauthentic posts filling the web. Last week, newsletter platform Substack added a tool to help identify content written by AI through a partnership with Pangram. That firm announced $9 million in new funding to tackle the problem of AI content flooding the internet. The issue is also impacting new startups. Digg shut down its Reddit competitor in March after it could not manage the number of bots flooding its site.
Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare says the problem is worsening. There is now more bot traffic on the web than human-generated requests. This milestone was reached faster than previously predicted.
LinkedIn’s response
In a post on LinkedIn, the company’s Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan admitted the Microsoft-owned social network is facing similar problems. “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,” he said.
The exec explained that the new button is one of several measures LinkedIn is using to reduce low-quality, AI-generated content. The company is also investing in automation defenses. It now blocks “hundreds of thousands” of automated comment attempts daily, and millions of other automation attempts in just the past couple of months.
Srinivasan said LinkedIn is also introducing new classifiers to identify if a post is AI slop or other low-quality content. This would reduce the amount of slop in suggested content recommendations from outside your network. The button ties into this measure as it will provide a source of signal that will allow LinkedIn to tune its AI models to better identify slop.
Plus, LinkedIn will begin privately flagging in users’ dashboards when people believe their content is coming off as inauthentic due to heavy use of AI. The company believes that this will help posters improve their writing, in the case that they’re simply using AI technology to refine their own work, rather than when they’re posting what’s considered full-on “slop” content.
Notably, the company is pulling its own “enhance your post” feature that had used AI to help you write. It’s replacing it with a feature that proofreads your words, instead of changing your voice.
Other improvements include expanding access to profile and page verification tools, and adding an option to block comments from company pages you no longer want to see, Srinivasan said.
What it means
For writers on the platform, the shift is clear. LinkedIn is removing tools that rewrite your voice and replacing them with ones that simply check spelling. The new reporting button allows the network to train its systems to spot bad content more accurately. Users will receive private feedback if their posts look too much like they were generated by a machine. This approach aims to keep the feed focused on human perspectives while giving creators a direct way to improve their own writing.
