LinkedIn has a name for the vaguely inspirational, AI-written posts clogging its feed, and now it has a button for them. The professional network has quietly added a “Seems like AI slop” option to its post menu, letting users flag content they think a machine wrote, 404 Media reported.
The button sits under the three-dot menu at the top of any post. Click it, and LinkedIn responds: “Thanks for letting us know. Your feedback helps improve the feed.” It then hides the post. 404 Media said it took about six seconds of scrolling to find a candidate, flagged by the spacing, emoji, bullet-point takeaways and “X is not Y” phrasing.
The wording is what stands out. The button does not say “this looks AI-generated.” It says “slop,” a blunt piece of internet slang for low-effort machine output, now baked into the interface of a Microsoft-owned platform.
Why LinkedIn is doing this
The move follows the platform’s May crackdown on generic AI posts, which suppressed slop from recommendations rather than removing it. The new button turns detection into a crowd-sourced signal. Every flag helps train LinkedIn’s own models to spot the stuff.
Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s chief product officer, confirmed as much in a post after the report. “AI slop is a top priority for all of us,” he wrote. The company is “ramping up a series of new and improved classifiers” to identify slop, and letting members flag posts to help “tune our models and make better feeds.”
He added a telling caveat. “AI and slop are not the same thing,” Srinivasan wrote. Many people refine their thoughts with AI, so LinkedIn will test a private nudge in a poster’s analytics when their writing “may have come off as inauthentic.” It is also replacing its “enhance your post” feature with a proofreader that does not change a user’s voice.
The scale of the problem
The numbers explain the urgency. Earlier this month, 404 Media reported that the detection service Pangram estimated 41 per cent of long-form LinkedIn posts, and 30 per cent of short ones, are likely AI-generated. Search “LinkedIn AI” and you find countless guides, some hosted on LinkedIn itself, teaching people to automate their posts.
The irony is doing a lot of work here. LinkedIn offers its own AI writing assistant that drafts profiles and posts for Premium subscribers. Its parent, Microsoft, is one of OpenAI’s biggest backers. The company is, in effect, selling the hose and the mop at once.
A wider fight against slop
LinkedIn is not alone. The preprint server arXiv now bans researchers who submit AI-riddled papers, and platforms have tightened rules on mass-produced AI channels. The pressure reflects a web where bots now outnumber humans in traffic terms.
Whether a report button moves the needle is another matter. Slop is, as Srinivasan admitted, hard to define, and the definition keeps shifting. But asking users to name it, out loud, is a small admission that the feed has a problem. It also shows that proving something is human is becoming its own kind of work.
