LinkedIn cracks down on users posting ‘AI slop’ after previously encouraging it
Microsoft Corp.’s LinkedIn is making a concerted effort to combat “AI slop,” or the low-quality, artificial intelligence-generated content that has been increasingly dominating user’s feeds. In a blog post today, LinkedIn Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan revealed that the company is adding a new “seems like AI slop” button for people to report posts that appear to be AI-generated.
The new button can be found in the ellipsis menu on all LinkedIn posts now, and will be coming to user’s comments too. According to Srinivasan, it will provide a way for users to report suspect posts and also help the company to train its AI-spotting AI models to enhance the quality of content found in user’s feeds.
The company isn’t stopping there, either. In addition, Srinivasan said LinkedIn is dropping the “enhance your post” button that uses AI to tweak user’s wording. It’s believed that this button probably encouraged a lot of the AI slop now found across LinkedIn’s feeds, so it’s being replaced by an option to simply have AI proofread what users have written, while leaving their natural voice intact.
The updates reflect a growing trend among online platforms to push back against AI-generated content as human users become more disgruntled by the inauthentic, computer-generated posts that now pop up seemingly everywhere they go online. Last week, for example, the popular newsletter platform Substack added a new tool that allows readers to scan new posts they’re reading to see if they were likely written by an AI model, in partnership with a startup called Pangram Labs Inc. Then, this week, Pangram revealed that it has raised $9 million in funding to try and stem the tsunami of AI content that’s now flooding the internet.
