Social networking platform LinkedIn will be detailing its plans on Wednesday to combat low-value AI content — aka AI slop — in its user feeds.
According to a report in Engadget, the changes will target everything from outright engagement bait to recycled “thought leadership” and other “generic” content that lacks authenticity and originality.
The report added that the company is also taking aim at posts and comments that show obvious signs of AI-generated content, such as “it’s not X, it’s Y” phrasing.
When identified by LinkedIn, Engadget noted, dubious posts will no longer appear in other users’ recommendations, though they’ll still be viewable to a person’s direct connections and followers.
Wednesday’s announcement is expected to provide details on how LinkedIn will distinguish between what adds perspective, context, or expertise to member engagement and what simply repeats existing ideas without contributing anything new.
Separating Expertise From Slop
Separating low-value AI content from legitimate expertise won’t be easy. “Detection is basically a moving target because the models keep getting better at sounding human,” said Jonathan Sterling, marketing director of Foxtown Marketing, a full-service marketing agency in Vero Beach, Fla.
“LinkedIn also can’t crank the dial too high without catching legitimate creators in the net, the ones who use AI as a writing assistant the way the rest of us use spellcheck,” he told TechNewsWorld. “And there’s the awkward business reality that volume drives ad inventory. Doesn’t really matter if the volume is any good,” he added.
The challenge for LinkedIn is that it cannot simply punish the use of AI, argued Ethan Yang, head of operations and strategy at CTGT, an AI research company in San Francisco.
“Many serious professionals use AI to edit, structure, or sharpen their writing,” he told TechNewsWorld. “The real distinction should be between AI-assisted expertise and AI-replaced expertise. If someone has done the research, has a real point of view, and uses AI to communicate it more clearly, that should not be treated the same as someone mass-producing engagement bait.”
Problem With Detection
Dustin Engel, co-founder and principal consultant at Elegant Disruption, a strategy and AI-focused consulting firm in Philadelphia, asserted that treating low-quality content as a simple AI-detection problem would be a mistake.
“Low-quality content existed long before generative AI, and plenty of high-quality content is legitimately AI-assisted,” he told TechNewsWorld. “So the real question is how do you reduce the spammy, repetitive, engagement-farming behavior without punishing normal use cases like editing, translation, or using AI to structure your thoughts?”
“And then there’s the practical reality that any rule you enforce at scale becomes a game,” he said. “Bad actors adapt quickly, and the platform has to manage false positives without creating a moderation environment that feels arbitrary or heavy-handed.”
The biggest challenge is that nobody can define AI slop cleanly without also sweeping up legitimate AI-assisted work, maintained Mark N. Vena, president and principal analyst of SmartTech Research, a technology advisory firm in Las Vegas.
“A thoughtful post drafted with AI may be more valuable than a human-written post that says absolutely nothing,” he told TechNewsWorld. “LinkedIn has to police quality and authenticity without becoming the taste police.”
Cyndee Harrison, principal of Synaptic, a small-business marketing and PR consultancy in Grand Rapids, Mich., agreed that detection will be a big challenge for LinkedIn. “I was once a prolific user of dashes, hyphens, and ellipses because I do a lot of the types of business writing where that kind of punctuation is naturally found,” she told TechNewsWorld. “Now, of course, those are assumed to be red flags for AI-written content.”
“The folks at LinkedIn are going to find out that cracking down on AI is harder than they might imagine,” predicted Dan Kennedy, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.
“As the Engadget story points out, LinkedIn itself encourages its users to improve their posts with AI, and there are plenty of legitimate uses such as improving the wording of a press release that might get flagged,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“Overall, two cheers for LinkedIn,” he added. “I’ll hold off on the third cheer until we see what this looks like in practice.”
Survival Tactic
Cracking down on AI slop is a necessary survival tactic for LinkedIn, contended Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst with the Enderle Group, an advisory services firm in Bend, Ore.
“LinkedIn’s core value proposition is built on authentic professional networking, reputation building, and the exchange of genuine industry expertise,” he told TechNewsWorld. “If the platform becomes flooded with low-effort, machine-generated slop, it ceases to be a useful professional tool and quickly devolves into a glorified spam folder.”
Low-quality AI-generated content introduces massive amounts of friction and noise, he added. “Users log on to the network to recruit and read actionable insights from peers,” he explained. “AI slop buries that valuable human signal under an avalanche of generic, engagement-baiting text.”
“Ultimately, it degrades trust,” he said. “When users can no longer tell if they are reading a colleague’s genuine experience or a bot’s hallucinated summary, they’ll likely simply stop engaging, and if they aren’t engaging, the service bleeds value and likely loses users over time.”
Elegant Disruption’s Engel agreed that AI slop undermines trust. “Platforms can chase detection forever and still lose if they don’t change incentives,” he said.
“The goal should be to make it easier for real expertise to stand out and harder for synthetic volume to win,” he continued. “If LinkedIn gets that right, it protects the long-term health of the platform. If it gets it wrong, you don’t just get a messier feed. You get a professional network that people stop taking seriously.”
Slop Works in the Short Term
Greg Sterling, co-founder of Near Media, a market research firm in San Francisco, pointed out that while people increasingly dislike AI-generated content, that won’t stop publishers and marketers from using it. “It’s fast and cheap and, in many cases, seen as good enough,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“The dirty secret is that slop works in the short term,” added Foxtown’s Jonathan Sterling.
“People pumping out 30 generic AI posts a month routinely outperform thoughtful creators who post twice, because for years the algorithm rewarded volume above everything else,” he explained. “LinkedIn’s update is finally tilting that math the other way, and good riddance.”
“Combating AI slop isn’t just a basic content moderation issue,” Enderle added. “It’s the defining competitive battleground for the future of the internet. The platforms that will thrive over the next decade won’t just be the ones with the best AI, but the ones that successfully deploy the best verification of human authenticity and high-value curation to assure the overall quality of the related experience.”
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