LinkedIn is pushing back against lengthy, low-quality posts generated with artificial intelligence, also known as “AI slop,” that users have become accustomed to seeing in their feeds.
The career-building and social networking site just added a button that allows users to easily report such content for review.
Now, when LinkedIn users are scrolling through posts and find one that they believe is AI, they can tap the three dots next to a post and in the menu that populates, the option “seems like AI slop” will appear. When users click the button, the post will be hidden and a message will appear that reads: “Thanks for letting us know. Your feedback helps improve the feed.”
After 404 Media first reported the innovation, LinkedIn’s chief product officer Hari Srinivasan posted an explanation on Thursday about why it’s important for the site to combat AI slop. Srinivasan wrote that the site is a place “with real people” who share their real perspectives, ideas and expertise” and said LinkedIn will make it easier than ever to flag posts that seem “inauthentic” or rely on “heavy use of AI” with the new button.
Srinivasan wrote, “We are ramping the ability for members to tell us if they believe a post or comment seems like AI slop. Slop is hard to define and the definition changes; this lets us tune our models and make better feeds.”
Srinivasan added that the company is also expanding its internal efforts to weed out AI-generated content, improving its automation defenses, and even removing the site’s “enhance your post” with AI option.
The move seems to be popular so far. Many LinkedIn users in the comments of Srinivasan’s post applauded the change. So did many Reddit users. On a popular post about the change, one top comment reads: “Finally, so no more motivational BS AI generated slops. Good job.”
Still, others questioned what the site’s true motives were, as some comments not-so-subtly suggested that LinkedIn is merely hoping to better train its AI to be more humanlike. “Let’s be real, it’s a way to get training data on what people spot as AI generated to train models to be less detectable,” one user griped.
Motivation aside, the site is certainly not the first to announce it would make new efforts to combat AI slop recently. In a July 20 video announcement, YouTube clarified its policies on AI-generated creator content, outlining three kinds of AI-generated content that aren’t eligible for monetization on the site, including repetitive content, off-putting or distressing content, and representations of people made with AI.
“AI can actually allow people to make a lot of videos,” YouTube’s trust and safety chief Matt Halprin explained in the video. Hairpin continued, “But that exact same new tool can allow you to make lots of videos really quickly that are very similar. They’re very generic and don’t really have a narrative arc and don’t really show your creativity.”
Halprin added, “So the same technology really enables great stuff, but it also enables stuff that’s kind of content farming, and that’s the stuff that we don’t want to have in YPP.”
Last year, Pinterest also added an “AI tuner,” which allows users to easily adjust how much AI-generated content they’ll see in their feeds. Around the same time, TikTok introduced a similar slider to give users more control.