LinkedIn adds a button to report AI-generated ‘slop’
TechCrunch Sarah Perez ● Covered by 4 sources
LinkedIn now lets you flag posts as AI slop with one click. It's the latest platform admitting its feed is drowning in bot-written junk.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Sarah Perez — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
LinkedIn just gave users a new way to fight back against the wave of robotic-sounding posts clogging their feeds: a button labeled "seems like AI slop." Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan announced the feature Thursday, framing it as part of a bigger push to keep the platform feeling human at a time when that's getting harder to guarantee.
The timing isn't a coincidence. Substack rolled out AI-detection tools with Pangram just last week. Pangram itself raked in $9 million in fresh funding this week to keep building tech that sniffs out machine-written text. And Digg's Reddit-style competitor collapsed back in March, in part because its founders couldn't keep bots from overrunning the site. Cloudflare, which sits in the middle of a huge chunk of internet traffic, says bots now outnumber humans online — a threshold it thought was still years away.
LinkedIn's slop button does double duty. Users get an outlet for their annoyance, sure, but the real value is in the data. Every click trains LinkedIn's classifiers to better distinguish genuine expertise from AI-padded filler, which the company says will thin out the low-quality posts that show up in recommendations from outside your network. Srinivasan also revealed that LinkedIn is already blocking hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts every single day, with millions more automation attempts stopped in just the last two months.
There's a softer side to this crackdown too. Rather than publicly shaming anyone, LinkedIn will privately nudge users whose posts read as inauthentic, giving them a chance to dial back the AI polish before it becomes a habit. Fittingly, the company is killing its own "enhance your post" AI writing tool — the one that rewrote your voice for you — and swapping in a plain proofreading feature that fixes typos without flattening your personality. LinkedIn is also widening access to profile verification and letting users block comments from company pages they're sick of seeing, small tweaks aimed at the same goal: making the platform feel like it's actually full of people again.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Good, LinkedIn should have done this two years ago — the platform basically pioneered the genre of AI-flavored humblebrag posts, so watching it try to clean up its own mess is a little rich. But the real story here is bigger than one social network: when Cloudflare says bots outnumber humans on the open web, every platform is going to need a slop button eventually, and the ones that wait too long will end up like Digg.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch