Due to an onslaught of “AI slop,”
LinkedIn is rethinking its strategy regarding AI-generated content on the platform’s main feed, as the business-to-business social network nixes AI-first publishing features while inviting users
to mark probable AI slop for deletion.
Major investments in artificial intelligence (AI) have helped the Microsoft-owned social-networking platform boost its Premium subscription and advertising
businesses,
bringing in billions of annual revenue.
However, while trying to help
advertisers, LinkedIn's AI-generation publishing tools have ushered in a wave of low-quality content plaguing users' feed experience.
On Thursday, LinkedIn announced a “seems like AI
slop” button in the drop-down menu on each feed post, allowing users to flag content they think has been written with AI. Clicking the button will immediately remove the post from the
user’s feed, alerting LinkedIn in the process.
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“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,” writes Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn's chief product officer.
To further reduce the amount of AI slop on LinkedIn’s feed, Srinivasan says the company is in the process of “ramping up” new classifiers designed to identify whether a
post is AI slop or “generally low-quality content.”
Most notably, the company is replacing its “enhance your post” feature, which allows users to compose posts with AI,
with a proofreading feature.
This decision marks a major shift in LinkedIn's approach to the embrace of AI-generation technology that aligns more with other social publishing and subscription
platforms.
While AI-generated videos and posts have the potential to bring in millions in
addition revenue for digital platforms, AI slop has begun to ruin the overall user experience, creating a double-edged sword for media platforms.
Pinterest, for example, announced last year that it would continue to introduce more generative AI tools
alongside new AI detection features. The next month, Pinterest's shares fell 20%.
More recently, Substack introduced an AI
detection feature designed by Pangram to scan posts, replies, and comments on the app in order to see an estimate of how much of the newsletter was written by AI.
Earlier this month, Patreon
also partnered with a company called Cloudflare to block automated bots (or “crawlers”) from using creators' work published on the platform to train AI models.
Cloudflare's feature
displaying bot versus human-generated search requests shows that 57.4% of requests are currently initiated by automated bots, while only 42.6% come from human users.