LinkedIn knows it has a slop problem. It has a button for that.
The button, which debuted the week of July 27, allows users to flag content on LinkedIn that they believe may be “AI slop.” The option appears in a three-dot menu in the top right of any post, and shows a diamond with an exclamation point, followed by the phrase, “Seems like AI slop.”
In a post to the platform on July 30, Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s chief product officer, explained that the button will help LinkedIn “tune our models and make better feeds.” It’s just one part of the brand’s overall strategy to reduce AI slop or “generally low-quality content.” Essentially, LinkedIn is using an AI-versus-AI approach by training its own detection models to distinguish between content that contains original thinking and content that’s just regurgitating existing thinking.
As AI-written content begins to take over social media, platforms like LinkedIn are faced with the challenge of bringing human ideas back to the surface. For several sites, that means baking AI detection and mediation features directly into the UX, allowing individual users to have some say in how AI content is handled.
Care for some LinkedIn with your slop?
Any LinkedIn user knows that the platform has long suffered with an AI slop epidemic. According to a July study from AI detection service Pangram, one in four long-form posts on LinkedIn, Medium, X, Reddit, and Substack were flagged as AI over the past two months. Of those total flagged posts, a whopping two-thirds came from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn may be an AI slop hot spot, but the whole internet is suffering with a similar problem. In June, tech company Cloudfare, which manages traffic for millions of websites, reported that bots now generate 57.5% of web page requests. That finding is essentially proof of the “dead internet theory,” or the idea that most activity online today is generated by nonhumans.
Right now, platforms are actively in the thick of dealing with this influx of automated content, and there don’t seem to be many cut-and-dry answers. Per Srinivasan’s post, “On comments alone, everyday we are now catching hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts, and have blocked billions of other automation attempts (posting at scale, slop) in the last couple months alone.”
As brands work through this conundrum, several are opting to hand some of the moderating power back to users—which presents a novel UX challenge. Though there can be overlap, AI slop often lives in a separate category from the kinds of posts that social media platforms are used to moderating, like violent or threatening content. Thus, brands need to create entirely new visual markers and categories to help users recognize AI moderation features.
How AI slop is presenting a novel UX challenge
Last October, Pinterest approached this problem by creating a new section in settings titled “AI content” and allowing users to toggle AI recommendations off by category, like “Art” and “Sports.” TikTok followed suit by testing an “AI-generated content” slider feature under its “Manage content” category in settings, letting users dictate their feed’s concentration of AI on a sliding scale. Most recently, during the week of July 20, Substack announced an integration with Pangram that gives users the ability to scan newsletters for an estimate of how much was written by AI.
All of these features are designed to hand the reins of AI moderation over to users in some capacity. The same can be said for LinkedIn’s “Seems like AI slop” button, which, according to Audrey Davis, LinkedIn’s director of product design and creative systems, is purposefully placed in a flow where members would typically report or provide content feedback, to make it easy to find.
“We are starting with the exclamation point, as that is indicative of an alert or caution, but also wanted to make sure it felt different from a formal report which uses a flag,” she explains. In other words, the AI slop button isn’t necessarily designed for narcing on individual users, but rather to help LinkedIn formulate a broader approach to cutting back on low-quality content. Davis says the platform “may explore other icon options in the future based on member feedback.”
Social media brands are in the thick of dealing with the AI slopification of their platforms. For users, that means a rare opportunity to peek behind the curtain at how their feeds are made.