LinkedIn adds a button to report AI-generated âslopâ
LinkedIn is taking aim at the âAI slopâ â low-quality, artificially generated content â filling its feed. On Thursday, the company announced that itâs adding
LinkedIn is taking aim at the âAI slopâ â low-quality, artificially generated content â filling its feed. On Thursday, the company announced that itâs adding a new feature to let users click a âseems like AI slopâ button when someoneâs post appears to have been written with AI. The move reflects a broader shift across online publishing platforms to cut back on AI content, as people have grown frustrated with the computer-written, inauthentic posts filling the web. Last week, for instance, newsletter platform Substack added a tool to help users identify when the content theyâre reading on its site was written by AI, through a partnership with Pangram. Meanwhile, Pangram this week announced $9 million in new funding to tackle the problems of AI content flooding the internet.
The problem is also impacting new startups, as Digg had to shut down its Reddit competitor in March, saying it couldnât get a handle on the number of bots flooding its site. Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare says the problem is just getting worse, as there is now more bot traffic on the web than human-generated requests â a milestone that was reached faster than it had previously predicted. Image Credits:LinkedIn In a post on LinkedIn, the companyâs Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan admitted the Microsoft-owned social network is facing similar problems. âAI 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,â he said. The exec explained that the new âSeems like AI slopâ button is now one of several measures LinkedIn is using to reduce the amount of low-quality, AI-generated content on its platform.
The company is also investing in automation defenses, where it now blocks âhundreds of thousandsâ of automated comment attempts daily, and millions of other automation attempts in just the past couple of months. Srinivasan said LinkedIn is also introducing new classifiers to identify if a post is AI slop or other low-quality content, which would reduce the amount of slop youâd see in suggested content recommendations from outside your network. (The button ties into this measure as it will provide a source of signal that will allow LinkedIn to tune its AI models to better identify slop.) Plus, LinkedIn will begin privately flagging in usersâ dashboards when people believe their content is coming off as inauthentic due to heavy use of AI. The company believes that this will help posters improve their writing, in the case that theyâre simply using AI technology to refine their own work, rather than when theyâre posting whatâs considered full-on âslopâ content.
