LinkedIn regrets its own AI tools

Social network removes hundreds of thousands of automated posts per day

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Image: Shutterstock via Dennis

LinkedIn is revising its strategy for AI content to combat a flood of so‑called AI slop (large quantities of superficial, automatically generated content). The professional social network is scrapping AI‑driven publishing features and at the same time giving users the option to flag suspected AI slop for removal.

Although LinkedIn’s substantial investments in artificial intelligence have contributed to the growth of subscriptions and advertising revenue, the AI tools for writing posts have also led to a wave of low‑quality content.

LinkedIn therefore announced a new button: Seems like AI slop. This appears in the menu of posts in the feed. Users can use it to flag content they believe has been written by AI. The post in question disappears immediately from their own feed.

According to Hari Srinivasan, chief product officer at LinkedIn, the platform now intercepts hundreds of thousands of automated attempts to comment every day and has blocked “billions of attempts” at automated postings in recent months. In addition, new classification models are being developed to better recognise AI slop and other forms of low‑quality content.

A striking change is that LinkedIn is replacing the ‘enhance your post’ feature, which allowed users to have AI write or expand a post, with a proofreading function. This shifts the focus from generating content to improving human‑written texts.

This change of course marks an important shift in the way LinkedIn views generative AI. Although AI content can generate additional revenue for digital platforms, an overabundance of automatically generated posts turns out to undermine the quality of the user experience.

LinkedIn is not alone in this. Pinterest previously introduced both generative AI tools and features to detect AI content. Substack has also recently added AI detection for newsletters, replies and comments. Patreon is now working with Cloudflare to prevent bots from using creators’ content to train AI models.

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