LinkedIn cracks down on users posting ‘AI slop’ after previously encouraging it
SiliconANGLE Mike Wheatley ● Covered by 4 sources
LinkedIn just added a 'seems like AI slop' report button and killed its old AI rewrite tool. Turns out the feature meant to help you write better was flooding feeds with fake thought leadership.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Mike Wheatley — read the original for the full story.
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LinkedIn spent the last couple years nudging users toward AI-polished posts. Now it's doing an about-face, and the timing says a lot about how bad things got.
The company's chief product officer, Hari Srinivasan, announced a new button sitting in the ellipsis menu of every post: "seems like AI slop." Click it, and you're flagging content that reads like it came out of a chatbot rather than a person. That data doesn't just vanish into a complaint box, either. It feeds LinkedIn's classifiers, the systems the company is building specifically to detect and downrank AI-generated posts before they hit anyone's feed.
More telling than the new button is what's disappearing. LinkedIn is killing its "enhance your post" feature, the one-click tool that used AI to rewrite whatever users typed. That tool is widely blamed for a lot of the generic, hollow-sounding "thought leadership" content that's overrun the platform. A 2024 study found more than half of long-form LinkedIn posts already looked like AI-assisted filler, and Srinivasan admits it's only gotten worse since. In its place: an AI proofreading option that fixes grammar without rewriting your voice, which is a meaningfully smaller ask.
LinkedIn isn't acting alone here. Substack rolled out AI-detection scanning last week with a startup called Pangram Labs, and Pangram itself just raised $9 million to fight what everyone in the industry is now openly calling an AI content flood. Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, pick a platform, and users are complaining about the same thing: feeds clogged with synthetic posts that add nothing.
LinkedIn says it's already blocking hundreds of thousands of automated comments daily using its own AI defenses, and will start quietly flagging accounts in their private dashboards when their posting looks too AI-heavy. The company insists this isn't about punishing people who use AI to touch up a paragraph. It's aimed at the wave of posts that are AI from top to bottom, dressed up as personal insight.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Nobody should feel sorry for LinkedIn here; it built the enhance-your-post button, watched it flood the platform with fake expertise, and only now acts surprised. The real lesson is that platforms keep shipping generative features without asking what happens when millions of people use them at once, then scramble for detection tools after the damage is visible. Expect every social platform to eventually run this same playbook: encourage AI content, get buried in it, launch a report button. It's a predictable cycle, and users are the ones stuck scrolling through the mess in between.
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