Social media sites are overrun with AI slop, churned out ad nauseum by increasingly ubiquitous AI tools that happen to have the lovely side effect of driving up the price of gaming hardware. At least one site has had enough, and it’s… LinkedIn, of all places.
LinkedIn has become practically unusable in recent months if you don’t have an appetite for low-effort “thought leadership” posts that just reek of AI slop. The kind of emoji-filled viral-bait that makes you say “man, this sure seems like it was written by an AI.”
Well, the Microsoft-owned professional networking site today introduced a new reporting button that’s marvelous in its simplicity. Now, alongside options to Save, Share, or Report a post is a new “Seems like AI slop” button.
Perfect. No notes.
According to a post from LinkedIn Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan, reporting via the button will help train LinkedIn’s own AI tools to better identify AI slop. No, the irony is not lost on me. (And never mind that LinkedIn itself at one point touted its own AI-powered writing assistant. We’re certainly not all trying to find the guy who did this.) Regardless, Srinivasan says the goal is to reduce the amount of AI slop people see on their feeds.
There are some genuinely useful and interesting applications for AI, like improving frame rates or building NPCs that can have actual conversations, but churning out slop is not one of them. I can only hope that other social media networks follow suit.
Unfortunately, even if LinkedIn (and other sites) were to ban AI content entirely, it would still likely have little impact on the total AI infrastructure buildout that has caused surging RAM prices and made gaming hardware more inaccessible than ever. But at least our feeds would be a little bit more human, and that I call a win.
Bo Moore is IGN’s Senior Manager of Tech. You can find him online @usebomswisely.
