LinkedIn, one of the most notorious bastions of AI slop online today, is finally cracking down on the deluge being seen across its site.
The social network is introducing a range of controls as it looks to turn off the tap of the torrent of AI slop increasingly dominating its website. You can try it now – just click on the three dots at the top-right of any LinkedIn post, and among the usual options to save, share or embed, you’ll see a new option – “Seems like AI slop”.
My only question is – what took you so long?
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“We really care about this”
In a LinkedIn post of his own, Hari Srinivasan, CPO at the company, explained the reasoning behind the roll-out in words which should be music to the ears of most LinkedIn users.
“AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this,” he declared. “People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas and expertise.”
Now, I try and keep my LinkedIn feed fairly professional – like many of us, I do try and use it for work purposes, after all. But the odd slop does slip in every now and then – usually 3rd-level connections trying to shill some crypto scam, or religious-themed pep talk.
I have to say, it’s incredibly satisfying to click the “Seems like AI slop’ and relegate such posts to the dustbin of history – much more so than LinkedIn’s previous system of reporting posts which may have sounded like scams or spam, but often just disappeared into silence.
As Srinivasan explained on the new reporting tools, “Slop is hard to define and the definition changes; this lets us tune our models and make better feeds.”
“We asked ourselves why do people post with AI anyway? The answer is LinkedIn isn’t a one-word kind of place and they feel more confident running their posts through AI. We’re taking this learning, removing the ‘enhance your post’ feature you see when you write a post or message & replacing with a feature that proofreads your words, but does not change your voice.”
Hopefully they more we use the tool, the smarter it will get – and cut down on the stuff we don’t want to see. The action goes two ways though – and LinkedIn will also be testing a way for admins and members to see in their analytics dashboard when your own content has been flagged as potential slop.
Let’s hope this is a bit more regulated – we don’t want online vigilantes carrying out campaigns against a company or person they may have a vendetta against.
Srinivasan says the approach is based on two learnings – “First, AI and slop are not the same thing; many people refine thoughts with AI, and we believe they want to know when they sound inauthentic. Second, we want members to get feedback from real humans on what sounds authentic – not just have an AI detector review it and get it wrong.”
Srinivasan also noted that LinkedIn (which let us remember is owned by Microsoft) will “continue to improve and invest in our automation defences..on comments alone, 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.”
This is a very welcome first step by LinkedIn, and lets just hope it’s the start of an ongoing crusade against AI slop – because no one wants to see any of that anymore.
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