Key Takeaways
- LinkedIn has fought low-quality content for years, including scam job postings.
- AI has made moderating content far harder to manage.
- AI detection firms estimate that a substantial share of LinkedIn posts and comments now involve AI, though LinkedIn disputed their results.
LinkedIn knows it has an AI problem.
Last month, the professional networking platform started giving users a way to flag posts and comments they believe were created by AI, using a “seems like AI slop” reporting button, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. The move aims to slow the flood of AI-created content.
LinkedIn isn’t alone. Most major social media platforms have tried to curb the rise of AI-generated posts, largely by relying on automated labels. It’s an approach with a spotty record, leaving some AI work unlabeled and mislabeling some human-created content as AI.
For example, social media star Nikolai Savic, who has five million followers on TikTok, is well-known for his creative cooking videos. He told the Journal last month that TikTok labeled some of his videos as AI-generated, even though he painstakingly edited them himself. The move caused him to lose credibility with fans.
“People already have in their minds that I’m only using AI,” Savic said. “This hurt my reputation so much. And at TikTok, nobody really seems to care.”
The stakes may be higher for LinkedIn, which sells itself as a trusted place to find useful information, build professional relationships and uncover career opportunities for its more than one billion members.
Many LinkedIn users turn to AI hoping it will help them communicate more clearly or post more often. Executives and industry observers caution that the result can be content that feels bland, overly polished or inauthentic.
AI as a new challenge
Brendan Gahan is the co-founder and CEO of Creator Authority, a LinkedIn influencer marketing agency. He told the Journal that “everybody uses AI to some degree.” However, he advises influencers to skip posting AI-generated content because it could damage their credibility. Success on the platform ultimately depends on credibility, he said.
LinkedIn has encountered content problems before, like oversharing and scam job posts. “We have been working on this domain of low-quality content for a long time,” Oscar Rodriguez, LinkedIn’s vice president of product, told the Journal.
AI is testing the platform on a much larger scale.
From April through June, 41% of LinkedIn’s long-form public posts and 30% of its public comments were entirely AI-generated, according to Pangram Labs, an AI-detection startup that analyzed nearly 57,000 pieces of content. The company found that LinkedIn had a higher concentration of AI-generated long posts than X, at 29%, and Reddit, at 13%.
Originality.ai, another AI-detection company, reached an even more striking conclusion. After reviewing 5,000 public LinkedIn posts in July, it determined that 81% showed more than a moderate amount of AI use. By comparison, just under half of the 5,500 public Reddit posts it reviewed met that same threshold.
LinkedIn disputed the research findings to the Journal, but did not share comparable results of its own.
Key Takeaways
- LinkedIn has fought low-quality content for years, including scam job postings.
- AI has made moderating content far harder to manage.
- AI detection firms estimate that a substantial share of LinkedIn posts and comments now involve AI, though LinkedIn disputed their results.
LinkedIn knows it has an AI problem.
Last month, the professional networking platform started giving users a way to flag posts and comments they believe were created by AI, using a “seems like AI slop” reporting button, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. The move aims to slow the flood of AI-created content.
LinkedIn isn’t alone. Most major social media platforms have tried to curb the rise of AI-generated posts, largely by relying on automated labels. It’s an approach with a spotty record, leaving some AI work unlabeled and mislabeling some human-created content as AI.