You open LinkedIn and find another dramatic story. Someone lost their job. Then their dog taught them leadership. Then they discovered the meaning of life.
And the post ends with:
“Agree?”
Welcome to modern LinkedIn.
Now LinkedIn has introduced a new reporting option:
“Seems like AI slop.”
At first, I laughed. Then I thought about it. Because LinkedIn helped create this problem.
And now it wants users to help clean it up.
AI was everywhere
LinkedIn went all-in on AI. Use AI to write your profile. Use AI for job descriptions. Use AI to create posts.
People listened. And people used it.
A lot.
Suddenly, LinkedIn was full of posts that sounded almost the same.
“Here are 5 hard truths.”
“Nobody talks about this.”
“I was sitting alone at 3 AM when I realised…”
“I lost everything, but then something magical happened.”
AI made posting easier.
But easy does not always mean good. Generating content with AI is easy.
Generating valuable content is much harder.
AI is not the villain
Some people love AI. Others hate it. One group wants AI everywhere. The other wants to burn it all down.
Both sides need to calm down.
AI is a tool.
The problem is not always the tool. The problem is how people use it. AI can help someone write better. It can also help someone publish 20 meaningless posts before breakfast.
LinkedIn focused on getting people to use AI.
It probably worked.
Then the platform started filling up with low-value content. And now the company needs a fix. So, LinkedIn gives us a button.
“Seems like AI slop.” But here comes the big question.
What exactly is AI slop?
Who decides what is slop?
Bad content? Generic content? AI-written content? Something that simply sounds like AI?
The definition is messy. You can write a terrible post without AI. You can write a great post with AI assistance. Someone may use AI to translate their thoughts from Hindi to English.
Should that person be reported for AI slop?
And who gets to decide?
A random person scrolling for five seconds?
That sounds risky.
LinkedIn created this problem
As a software engineer, I have seen this happen.
A company builds a feature. People start using it. A problem appears.
Someone says: “That is a good problem to have.” Later, the problem becomes huge.
Then everyone sits in a meeting asking:
“How did this happen?”
LinkedIn introduced AI everywhere. Now it is asking users to identify the content it helped create. That does not feel like a real solution.
LinkedIn has the resources. It can build better detection systems. It can use AI provenance and watermarking. It can study content patterns. It can give users a way to appeal wrong decisions.
Instead, it is asking humans to guess.
And humans love guessing. Especially when there is a button.
Think before clicking
The biggest problem is misuse. Someone may report a post because they disagree with it. Someone may report a person they dislike. Someone may think good English automatically means AI.
And trolls?
They will definitely troll.
AI slop is a real problem. But bad human content also exists. The internet was full of nonsense long before ChatGPT arrived.
The goal should not be to punish content that looks like AI. The goal should be to improve content quality. Because LinkedIn does not only have an AI problem.
It has a quality problem.
AI simply made that problem louder. So, before clicking “Seems like AI slop,” think twice.
You may be right. But you may also be wrong. And fixing LinkedIn’s mess should not become the full-time job of its users.
. . .
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This post was previously published on Sushila Devi’s blog.
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