LinkedIn wants you to believe it’s serious about cracking down on AI slop. To prove it, they’ve removed the button for generating AI slop and added one to call it out.
“AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this,” CPO Hari Srinivasan wrote. “People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives.”
Really? Where?
People come to LinkedIn to connect with people higher up the org chart in the hopes of selling a product and/or themselves. That’s the business model. Who would go there otherwise?
It’s a place where everyone pretends it’s not about the money, while knowing that it’s always about the money.
That’s why LinkedIn is a soulless void, where honesty and feeling vanish under the tsunami of regurgitated happy-happy biz speak. How else to explain the fact that no one laughs when someone claims to be “a visionary and a thought-leader”?
AI has spread here faster than Asian Carp on the Mississippi because it excels at happy-happy biz speak. Combine that with a system that values jargon density over logic, and you’ve got LinkedIn’s almost convincing simulacrum of communication.
Originality or AI. You can’t have them both.
A company with the oxymoronic name Originality.AI found that “81.2% of 5,000 July posts were Likely AI.” (“Likely” is capitalized in the original. Does that make it more or less likely that it was written by AI?) My response is Theodore Sturgeon’s law, “90% of everything is crap,” with Harlan Ellison‘s addendum: “Ted Sturgeon is an optimist.”
AI writing is not hard to spot. It’s sometimes clear, always lifeless, and as straight and flat as a Nebraska highway. It doesn’t wander off topic, it offers no unexpected views. It takes you from point A to point A-and-a-half in the most predictable manner possible.
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Also, consider that there are millions of technically readable posts on LinkedIn. That isn’t happening without AI. The fact is, 95% of English speakers can’t write a simple, declarative sentence — let alone one with a subordinate clause.
To quote John Gruber: “Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, et al. are ‘better writers’ than most humans and produce better prose than the median human. But no [expletive deleted]. Most people are terrible writers.”
(The headline on Gruber’s post is, “Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing.” Now I love overheated invective, but Claude perverting writing? I wish. That makes it sound interesting.)
The easy way to prove that you, not AI, wrote it.
AI can find patterns in large datasets, but humans can find them without the data. Pareidolia is the human ability to find shapes (usually faces and usually in clouds) in all sorts of things. We impose order where there isn’t any. That’s one of the reasons we’ve flourished in a chaotic world.
The downside to finding patterns where they don’t exist is paranoia and conspiracy theories. The upside is inspiration. The random connection of seemingly unrelated things is the source of genius.
“Peanut butter and jelly?”
“A musical comedy about Barbie?”
“The real housewives of Rhode Island?” (Just because it’s genius doesn’t mean it’s good.)
Nothing says written by a real person like an almost off-topic digression or parenthetical comment. That’s almost all this article is. You may hate it (why are you still reading?), but I guarantee at no point did you doubt it was written by a human.
LinkedIn loves AI slop
LinkedIn’s complaints about AI slop are an attempt to imitate authenticity, to show that it vaguely cares about users’ interests. I have no doubt there is some concern that it will drive readers away, but where would they go? For better or worse, no other site fills this niche in the business ecosystem. (I have now met the minimum jargon requirements for a business article.)
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