Linkedin battles ai slop: a desperate plea for human content

The digital swamp has reached a new level of viscosity. Social media, particularly LinkedIn, is drowning in a torrent of AI-generated ‘thought leadership’ – a frankly nauseating deluge of emoji-laden platitudes masquerading as insightful commentary.

A microsoft-owned mess

It’s a bizarre turn of events, to find LinkedIn, the supposed bastion of professional networking, battling its own technological offspring. The platform, now practically unusable for anyone not actively seeking a dose of algorithmic banality, has introduced a new reporting button: ‘Seems like AI slop.’ A singularly blunt instrument, and a damning indictment of the current trend.

Linkedin’s counteroffensive

According to Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan, this isn’t some whimsical gesture. It’s a calculated attempt to train LinkedIn’s own AI systems to identify and, frankly, dismiss this pervasive, low-effort content. The irony, of course, is palpable – a company once championing its own AI writing assistant now desperately trying to filter out the very thing it helped create. It's a recursive loop of digital decay, and frankly, exhausting.

Beyond the band-aid

Srinivasan acknowledges that genuine AI applications – optimizing frame rates in games, crafting believable NPC dialogue – hold real promise. But churning out this endless stream of derivative, AI-produced content isn’t one of them. It’s a symptom of a broader problem: the relentless prioritization of quantity over quality, driven by the relentless demands of advertising revenue. The fact remains that even if LinkedIn – and other platforms – were to entirely ban AI content, the underlying infrastructure supporting this output – the massive investment in AI processing power – will continue to drive up the cost of RAM, making gaming hardware increasingly inaccessible for a significant portion of the population. That’s a cold, hard reality.

A small victory

But at least, for the moment, our feeds will be marginally less populated with digital ghosts. It’s a small win, certainly, but one that represents a nascent recognition that human engagement – genuine thought, real experience – is still fundamentally more valuable than a perfectly optimized, algorithmically-generated echo.

Bo Moore, Senior Manager of Tech, IGN