LinkedIn adds a 'seems like AI slop' button so users can flag fake-sounding posts
The Microsoft-owned professional network is blocking hundreds of thousands of automated comments a day and scrapping its own AI writing tool, because its members want to hear from real people, not bots.
Key points
- LinkedIn launched a "Seems like AI slop" report button on Thursday, letting members flag posts that appear to be computer-written rather than genuine.
- The platform is blocking hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts daily, and millions of other bot actions over the past two months.
- Newsletter platform Substack added an AI-content label tool last week through a partnership with detection company Pangram.
- Pangram raised $9 million in new funding this week to help platforms fight low-quality AI content.
- Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare says bot traffic now outpaces human-generated web requests, a tipping point it did not expect to arrive this soon.
LinkedIn has a slop problem. Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan said this week that AI slop, meaning posts that are clearly mass-produced by AI tools rather than written by a real person drawing on real experience, has become one of the platform's biggest complaints from members. "People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas, and expertise," he wrote.
The new report button is the most visible fix. Click it on any post that feels hollow or machine-generated and LinkedIn logs that signal. Behind the scenes, the company feeds those reports into new classifiers, which are software filters that scan posts and score them on authenticity, to reduce how often low-quality AI content appears in recommendations beyond your own network.
What else is LinkedIn actually doing?
The button is one piece of a wider crackdown. LinkedIn now blocks hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts every single day. It is also rolling out private dashboard warnings: if enough people flag your posts as inauthentic, you will get a quiet heads-up rather than a public shaming.
One move stands out. LinkedIn is pulling its own "enhance your post" feature, which used AI to rewrite your drafts entirely. The replacement tool proofreads your words but keeps your voice intact. That is a notable reversal: the company helped create the very problem it is now fighting.
Is this happening everywhere, not just LinkedIn?
Yes. The problem is much bigger than one platform. First reported by TechCrunch AI, the same week LinkedIn made its announcement, Substack added a labelling tool so readers can see when a newsletter was AI-generated, built with Pangram, a startup that detects AI-written text. Pangram then announced a $9 million funding round to scale that work.
The scale is striking. Cloudflare, the company that handles traffic routing for a large chunk of the web, reported that bot-generated requests now outnumber requests made by actual humans. That milestone arrived faster than Cloudflare's own forecasts suggested it would.
A new site called Digg tried to rebuild a Reddit-style community this year and shut down in March. Founders said bots flooded the platform faster than they could remove them.
| Platform | Action | When |
|---|---|---|
| "Seems like AI slop" report button + classifier filters | This week | |
| Pulled AI post-rewriting tool | This week | |
| Substack | AI-content labels via Pangram partnership | Last week |
| Pangram | $9 million funding round | This week |
| Digg | Shut down Reddit competitor due to bot overload | March 2025 |
What should you do if you use LinkedIn for work?
First, do not panic about using AI to help you write. LinkedIn's private warning system targets posts that read as fully machine-generated, not posts where you used a tool to clean up grammar or sharpen a sentence you already wrote. The proofreading replacement tool they are launching is designed exactly for that use case.
The honest takeaway: use AI to improve your thinking, not to replace it. A post that starts with your genuine opinion and gets tidied up with a tool will look and feel different from one that was generated from a blank prompt. Your LinkedIn network can tell the difference. Apparently, so can LinkedIn's new software.
