LinkedIn’s Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan says AI slop is now a “top priority.” Here’s what the platform is actually changing.
LinkedIn has had enough of AI slop, or at least it says it has.
In a post shared this week, Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s Chief Product Officer, laid out a series of changes the platform is rolling out to cut down on low-quality, AI-generated content. “AI slop is a top priority for all of us,” he wrote. “We really care about this. People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas and expertise.”
It’s a problem plenty of users will recognise. Scroll through LinkedIn long enough and you’ll likely hit a post that feels a little too polished, a little too generic, stuffed with bullet points and phrases like “actionable insights” that don’t actually say much. That’s the content LinkedIn is now trying to push back on.
The scale of the problem
According to Srinivasan, the platform is already catching a significant amount of automated activity. “On comments alone, everyday we are now catching hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts, and have blocked billions of other automation attempts (posting at scale, slop) in the last couple months alone,” he said.
That gives some sense of just how much of this activity is happening behind the scenes, even before a human ever sees it.
What’s actually changing
The most visible change is a new reporting option. Members will be able to flag posts or comments they believe are AI generated or low quality. Srinivasan was upfront that this isn’t a simple fix. “Slop is hard to define and the definition changes,” he said, adding that member reports will help LinkedIn “tune our models and make better feeds.”
Alongside that, LinkedIn is rolling out new classifiers designed to detect AI generated or low-quality posts automatically, which should reduce how much of that content shows up in suggested posts and content from outside a user’s network.
There’s also a quieter change coming for people who post regularly. LinkedIn plans to test a private feature within users’ analytics dashboards that flags when their own content may be coming across as inauthentic or heavily AI-written. Srinivasan explained the thinking behind this. “AI and slop are not the same thing,” he said. “Many people refine thoughts with AI, and we believe they want to know when they sound inauthentic.” He also noted the platform wants feedback to come from real people rather than automated detection tools, since those “get it wrong.”
Why “enhance your post” is going away
Perhaps the most telling change is one aimed at LinkedIn’s own tools. The platform is removing its “enhance your post” feature, which used AI to rewrite what users had drafted. Srinivasan said LinkedIn had asked itself why people turn to AI when writing posts in the first place. “The answer is LinkedIn isn’t a one-word kind of place and they feel more confident running their posts through AI,” he said.
In its place, LinkedIn will introduce a proofreading feature instead, one designed to correct grammar and clarity “but does not change your voice.”
More verification on the way
LinkedIn is also expanding profile and page verification, so members have a clearer sense of who they’re actually connecting with and who is behind the content they’re reading. Users will additionally be able to block comments from company pages they no longer want to see.
Srinivasan indicated this is an ongoing effort rather than a one-off update. “There is more to come,” he said. “Will do a better job keeping you all updated.”
For a platform whose entire value proposition rests on professional credibility, whether these changes meaningfully shift what people actually see in their feeds remains to be seen.
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