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Bland, AI-generated posts have made LinkedIn the butt of many internet jokes this year. The platform has heard loud and clear its users’ complaints about long, generic missives never touched by human hands.
As AI has made it easier than ever to create huge volumes of content cheaply and easily, this “slope” has flooded the Internet. YouTube, Pinterest, Spotify and other platforms have all sought to limit the amount of spammy AI-generated content their users see.
But LinkedIn was particularly hard hit. Scrolling through the professional networking site earlier this year could mean being bombarded with emoji-accented bulleted lists, references to “B2B sales” and asking for a follow or comment to learn more.
A report released in July by Pangram, a research firm that tracks AI content online, found that more than 40% of long-form posts on the platform were generated by AI, compared to about 30% on X and Medium and a lower percentage on Reddit and Substack.
So now LinkedIn is stepping up its fight against slop.
“I know you think you’re doing the right thing with your perfect bullet point and your hook at the top, and you’ve followed all the advice from LinkedIn advisors on the Internet,” Dan Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief, who leads the platform’s content strategy, told CNN in an interview. “But what works is being human.”
There is some irony in this, given that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. The tech giant has been pushing people to adopt its AI tools for everything from writing to coding, and it faces stiff competition from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. LinkedIn previously offered AI tools to edit or rewrite posts, although it recently reduced the offers.
But low-quality AI posts are a business problem for LinkedIn. They everything starts to sound the same, Roth said.
If users see too many generic posts about AI, instead of content that actually teaches them something or gives them a deeper understanding of a professional connection, LinkedIn risks losing them to other platforms.
In August, LinkedIn rolled out a button allowing users to report when a post “looks like an AI error,” which was clicked more than a million times in its first two weeks. Now the company is trying to use its own AI systems to help eliminate AI errors on the platform and remind LinkedIn users how to post like humans.
The company has assembled a team largely made up of former journalists and social media experts who have the savvy to recognize generic and sloppy content. These experts help train LinkedIn’s AI model on what authentic and useful posts look like. If the model flags a post as low-quality AI-generated content, it will be less likely to be distributed beyond that user’s direct connections.
Another key part of the strategy is a management team of creators who act as “content therapists” for executives, subject matter experts and other LinkedIn users, many of whom have become accustomed to the convenience of using AI to write what, at first glance, appear to be polished articles, Roth said.
“A lot of times today, they’ll put it out through Claude or Gemini or wherever, they’ll post it on LinkedIn and it’ll perform poorly. And then they come to the team and ask, ‘Why did this perform poorly?'” Roth said. “And the best thing you can do is give it back to them and say, ‘Did you enjoy reading this? Do you see yourself in this?’
Instead, the team encourages users to embrace imperfections in their posts – to create videos by resting their phone against a cup of coffee, rather than filming in an expensive studio, or to post a post to start a conversation, even if it’s not a complete thought.
These efforts are showing the first signs of success. Improvements to LinkedIn’s detection systems have led to a 40% drop in views of content classified as AI slop, the platform announced last month.
That’s not to say LinkedIn is completely opposed to AI, Roth said, adding that “not everyone is born a communicator.” But if content isn’t edited or personalized, it’s less likely to reach a wide audience on the platform.
“We’re just trying to push people to be more humane,” he said. “That’s what it takes to be able to cut through the noise.”
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