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LinkedIn declares war on AI slop

The job networking site plans to target low-quality AI posts that distract its users from finding value on the platform.

LinkedIn declares war on AI slop
[Source photo: elenabsl/Adobe Stock]

AI is everywhere these days. Try as you might to avoid it, you’re not likely to succeed.

LinkedIn, though, is attempting to draw a line in the sand and, if not completely eliminate the AI slop on its pages, at least cut back on it.

The company plans to target low-quality AI posts that distract its users from finding value on the platform. That has been a growing problem in recent months as people have trawled LinkedIn for engagement among professional users.

The company’s VP of product, Laura Lorenzetti, says LinkedIn isn’t banning all posts generated by artificial intelligence. Some, she concedes, actually have some value. Others, though? Those need to go.

They won’t be vanishing anytime soon, however. As the company refines the tools that will hunt out the offending posts, it will be rolling things out slowly—and it could be several months before all users see less slop in their feeds.

The new systems will target three types of AI content: generic AI-generated posts and comments, attention-bait videos, and automation tools that create AI content.

Hunting the robots

LinkedIn isn’t offering a lot of in-depth details about how it plans to scrub this content, but Lorenzetti says the company is using an “AI solving AI” approach.

Newly built systems will parse posts and determine which of those offer original thinking and which lack substance. The systems are designed to learn over time, using the engagement patterns of users and identifying language that adds perspective versus simply regurgitating existing ideas.

Human editors will be involved as well, labeling thousands of posts as original or generic to help teach the AI which posts to flag and which to leave alone.

Similarly, the company is putting together a list of markers that are common among low-quality, AI-composed comments to purge those from the system in the future. Identifiers such as word patterns and the volume of comments are key to that hunt. (An AI tool, for instance, can compose and post something much faster than a human.)

Once the offending posts are identified, they won’t appear in other users’ recommendations. They will, however, still be viewable to a person’s direct connections and followers. So it’s not a perfect solution.

AI proliferation

AI comments, it’s worth noting, are already a violation of LinkedIn’s terms of service. But that hasn’t stopped many users from utilizing tools to create them, often to game the system’s algorithm and increase the visibility of a post.

It’s also worth pointing out that LinkedIn itself hasn’t been afraid to incorporate AI into its workflow. The company offers a number of generative AI tools, including one that helps you “enhance” your profile, refining your profile’s Headline, About, and Experience sections. AI will also help job seekers with their search. And the company uses AI to help advertisers plan, launch, and optimize their campaigns.

That said, the problem of AI-generated content on the web is fast reaching a critical level. A report from Graphite, from the first quarter of 2026, found that the number of articles published online that are generated by an AI system are now equal to the number written by humans.

The only upside is that, for now, that number seems to have hit a plateau, with no notable rise in the AI-to-human ratio in the past year. The study did not examine whether the AI stories receive as much traffic as human-generated ones. A separate study found that AI-generated stories do not perform as well in search engines.

LinkedIn’s feed, though, doesn’t follow the same patterns as a search engine. Engagement and familiarity (or possible familiarity) are, in part, what make up what you see on the home page. In the future, the company hopes more of that content will be from real people.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Morris is a veteran journalist with more than 30 years of experience. Learn more at chrismorrisjournalist.com. More

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