LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals. It used to be quite boring, but now people have found it’s a great place to try to earn business brain clout by going there and dumping AI slop. Microsoft, which purchased LinkedIn in 2016, has decided to acknowledge the scourge of the “What losing my childhood Golden Retriever to pancreatic cancer taught me about B2B sales”-style chum on the platform with a new button that flags it as AI slop.
Instead of just reporting your ex-boss’s posts as spam, you can now tag them with “seems like AI slop.” The move comes after AI detector startup Pangram recently claimed that over 40 percent of long-form posts on LinkedIn are AI garbage. Pangram has its own problems, but the publicity forced Microsoft to reckon with something anyone who has come within three clicks of LinkedIn has known for months.
“AI slop is a top priority for all of us,” chief product officer Hari Srinivasan says in a post (via The Verge). “We really care about this.” In a post definitely not written with the help of AI, he continued, “We are ramping the ability for members to tell us if they believe a post or comment seems like AI slop. Slop is hard to define and the definition changes; this lets us tune our models and make better feeds.”
One of the ironies of this whole thing is that LinkedIn had built in an “enhance your post” feature to achieve exactly this outcome of slop-ifying the platform. It’s now walking that back. Just “proofreads” now. “We asked ourselves why do people post with AI anyway?” Srinivasan wrote. “The answer is LinkedIn isn’t a one-word kind of place and they feel more confident running their posts through AI. We’re taking this learning, removing the ‘enhance your post’ feature you see when you write a post or message & replacing with a feature that proofreads your words, but does not change your voice.”
Attempts to de-slopify LinkedIn come right as Microsoft reported $35.8 billion in profit for the quarter after spending $41 billion on capital investments, including building out its data center infrastructure to service the AI revolution everyone swears will improve our lives any day now. What does Microsoft think the AI is being used for? Surely not a bubble that’s making its gaming hardware unaffordable and the broader internet unreadable in the meantime.
“We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our ‘theory of the mind’ that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other,” CEO Satya Nadella wrote back in January. “This is the product design question we need to debate and answer.” Unfortunately he didn’t post it on LinkedIn so there’s no “seems like AI slop” button to press.