LinkedIn adds report button for AI-generated content
▼ Summary
– LinkedIn is adding a “seems like AI slop” button for users to flag low-quality, AI-generated content on its feed.
– The platform is blocking hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts daily and millions of other automation attempts.
– LinkedIn is introducing classifiers to identify AI slop and reduce its appearance in content recommendations from outside users’ networks.
– The company will privately notify users when their posts are perceived as inauthentic due to heavy AI use.
– LinkedIn is replacing its AI “enhance your post” feature with a proofreading tool that preserves the user’s voice.
LinkedIn is making a clear move to clean up its feed by targeting low-quality, AI-generated content. On Thursday, the platform announced a new feature that lets users click a button on posts that appear to be written by artificial intelligence. This tool is part of a larger effort across the internet to push back against the flood of inauthentic material that has frustrated users.
The professional networking site is not alone in this fight. Last week, newsletter platform Substack introduced a feature to help readers spot AI-written content, partnering with the startup Pangram. That same company just secured $9 million in new funding to combat the rising tide of AI content online. The issue is even affecting newer platforms, as Digg shut down its Reddit competitor in March, citing an inability to control the number of bots flooding the site.
Data from internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare underscores the scale of the problem. The company reports that bot traffic now outpaces human-generated requests on the web, a milestone that arrived faster than anticipated.
Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s chief product officer, acknowledged the challenge in a post on the platform. “AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this. People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas, and expertise,” he wrote.
The new “Seems like AI slop” button is just one part of a broader strategy. LinkedIn is also ramping up automation defenses, blocking hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts daily and millions of other automation attempts in recent months. The company is introducing new classifiers to detect AI slop and other low-quality content, which will reduce how much of it appears in suggested recommendations from outside a user’s network. The button itself will feed into these classifiers, helping LinkedIn’s AI models become more accurate at spotting problematic posts.
For users who rely heavily on AI to write their posts, LinkedIn will privately flag in their dashboards when others perceive their content as inauthentic. The company hopes this will encourage better writing, especially for those using AI to refine their own work rather than generating full-blown slop.
In a notable shift, LinkedIn is also retiring its “enhance your post” feature, which used AI to help users write. It will be replaced with a tool that simply proofreads content, preserving the user’s original voice.
Additional updates include expanding access to profile and page verification tools and adding an option to block comments from company pages users no longer wish to see, according to Srinivasan.
(Source: TechCrunch)
