Workplace social network revealed a host of features attempting to stop rapid spread of artificially generated, low quality posts across the site
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More than a million people have complained about “AI slop” on LinkedIn, as it attempts to stop it proliferating across the site.
In recent months, user of the workplace social network have spotted a growing trend across many posts. Its news feed was being populated by more and more “slop”, or artificially generated, low quality posts.
In response, at the end of July, LinkedIn announced a suite of features including a “seems like AI slop” button that users could press to report such posts. The company would also work harder to automatically identify such posts and avoid showing them to users, it said at the time.
Now, LinkedIn’s chief product officer Hari Srinivasan has revealed that vast numbers of people have used the button. And it appears to be working, he suggested.
“First, thank you,” he wrote in a post on the site. “Over a million people have now clicked ‘seems like AI slop,’ since we launched it two weeks ago... helping us better understand how our community experiences low-quality content.”
He noted that the button appears on any post or comment by clicking the three dot menu in the corner. Users can then report the post for seeming like AI slop.
He also said that the company would take another step to try and crack down on such low-quality content. If a post receives enough reports, users may see a message in their analytics showing that people had chosen to report it.
“We approached this assuming good intent; I know I'm increasingly conscious on how to not sound like AI & the goal is to provide helpful feedback,” he wrote.
Mr Srinivasan stressed that the button is not intended as a solution on its own, and that no one piece of feedback decides whether a post is shown. “We look at many signals together, and we've built safeguards to help prevent individual feedback from being used to unfairly target other members,” he wrote.
While he said he was “hesitant” to give numbers, because the feed would show differently to everyone, users overall are seeing 40 per cent less views on posts that have been classified as AI slop compared with a few weeks ago, he said. “Despite the progress, we know we have more to do to ensure LinkedIn remains a place where you can find real people & real perspectives... this all remains very top of mind,” he wrote.
When it was introduced, LinkedIn said that the button was just one part of a range of attempts to stop the proliferation of AI-generated posts. It would use better systems to spot such posts automatically, it said, and work to change its algorithm so they are less likely to show.
It also removed an “enhance with AI” button that let users quickly use artificial intelligence to re-write a post. Instead, that has been replaced by a proofreading option that will make fewer changes to a post.
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