40% of LinkedIn posts are AI slop, study finds

Research from AI detection startup Pangram found that 40% of long-form posts on LinkedIn are fully AI-generated. Now the Microsoft-owned platform is fighting back, rolling out a "seems like AI slop" button that lets users flag posts they suspect were written by a machine rather than a person.

The button sits in the three-dot menu on every post and feeds directly into LinkedIn's detection systems. "Slop is hard to define, and the definition changes; this lets us tune our models and make better feeds," said chief product officer Hari Srinivasan in a post announcing the change.

Flagged posts will see reduced reach, similar to being marked "not interested", while the original poster receives a private notice in their analytics dashboard suggesting their content may have come across as inauthentic.

According to Srinivasan, the company blocks over hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts on a daily basis, while the total number of automated actions blocked by the company within the last few months reaches millions of operations.

Moreover, Facebook will be expanding its profile and page verification tools, along with providing users with the ability to block unwanted comments made from company pages.

Moreover, the newsletter platform Substack introduced an AI detection feature last week via its collaboration with Pangram, which recently raised $9 million in funding for its detection technology.

The Reddit competitor Digg was forced to close in March because of its inability to manage bot traffic, and Cloudflare recently reported that bot traffic on the internet surpassed human traffic.

It should be pointed out that LinkedIn is also discontinuing the use of its "enhance your post" AI writing tool, replacing it with a proofreading tool that maintains a user's voice.