Why LinkedIn tolerates AI slop
▼ Summary
– LinkedIn claims to prioritize cracking down on AI slop by removing its AI generation button and adding a feature to flag such content, as stated by CPO Hari Srinivasan.
– The article argues LinkedIn is a soulless platform driven by money and self-promotion, where AI thrives because it excels at hollow, jargon-heavy business speak.
– A study by Originality.AI found that 81.2% of 5,000 July posts on LinkedIn were likely AI-generated, supporting the scale of the problem.
– AI writing is described as lifeless and predictable, but many humans are poor writers, making AI-generated prose often appear better than the median human effort.
– The author suggests that human writing is identifiable by off-topic digressions or parenthetical comments, which AI cannot replicate, and criticizes LinkedIn’s anti-slop efforts as a shallow imitation of authenticity.
LinkedIn would have you believe it is taking a hard line against AI-generated content. To demonstrate its commitment, the company has removed the button that creates it and introduced a new one for flagging it. Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan insists that “AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this,” adding that people use the platform to connect with real individuals and share genuine perspectives.
Really? Where exactly?
The actual draw of LinkedIn is the chance to connect with people further up the corporate ladder, usually to pitch a product or oneself. That is the entire business model. Who would show up otherwise? It is a space where everyone collectively pretends that money is not the motivation, all while knowing it is always about the money.
This is why LinkedIn feels like a soulless void, where authentic emotion and honesty get buried under an endless wave of regurgitated corporate cheerfulness. How else can you explain that nobody laughs when someone describes themselves as “a visionary and a thought-leader”? AI has spread across this platform faster than Asian Carp through the Mississippi, largely because it excels at producing exactly that kind of hollow business speak. Pair that with a system that rewards jargon density over logical thinking, and you have LinkedIn’s almost convincing imitation of human communication.
You can have originality or you can have AI. Not both.
A company called Originality. AI, which carries an oxymoronic name if ever there was one, found that “81.2% of 5,000 July posts were Likely AI.” The capital L in “Likely” makes you wonder whether that was intentional or just another artifact of machine generation. My own reaction is to recall Theodore Sturgeon’s law that “90% of everything is crap,” along with Harlan Ellison’s amendment: “Ted Sturgeon is an optimist.”
Spotting AI writing is not difficult. It can be clear, but it is always lifeless, running as straight and flat as a Nebraska highway. It never wanders off topic, never offers an unexpected perspective. It moves you from point A to point A-and-a-half in the most predictable way imaginable.
Consider also that there are millions of technically readable posts on LinkedIn. That volume is simply not achievable without AI assistance. The plain truth is that a large majority of English speakers cannot craft a simple declarative sentence, let alone one with a subordinate clause. As John Gruber put it: “Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, et al. are ‘better writers’ than most humans and produce better prose than the median human. But no [expletive deleted]. Most people are terrible writers.” (Gruber’s headline calls Anthropic’s watermarking feature “a Perversion of Writing.” I enjoy a bit of overheated rhetoric, but Claude perverting writing? I wish. That would make it far more interesting.)
Here is the easy way to prove you wrote something yourself.
AI can identify patterns in massive datasets, but humans can find patterns without any data at all. Pareidolia is our ability to see shapes, usually faces, in clouds and other random objects. We impose order where none exists. That tendency has helped us thrive in a chaotic world. The downside is paranoia and conspiracy theories. The upside is inspiration. Making unexpected connections between unrelated things is the very source of genius.
“Peanut butter and jelly?”
“A musical comedy about Barbie?”
“The real housewives of Rhode Island?” (Being a genius idea does not make it a good one.)
Nothing signals human authorship quite like a near-off-topic digression or a parenthetical aside. This article is almost entirely made of them. You might hate it, and you might wonder why you are still reading, but I guarantee you never once questioned whether a person wrote it.
LinkedIn’s stance on AI slop is essentially performative. The company is trying to imitate authenticity, to signal that it vaguely cares about what users want. There is probably some genuine worry that low-quality content will push readers away, but where would they go? For better or worse, no other platform fills this particular niche in the business world. And with that, I have satisfied the minimum jargon quota for a business article.
(Source: MarTech)
