More than a million LinkedIn users clicked the “seems like AI slop” button in its first two weeks, and the platform now says content flagged that way is pulling roughly 40% fewer views than it did before the feature shipped on July 30. LinkedIn chief product officer Hari Srinivasan disclosed the numbers last week, alongside “billions of other automation attempts” the company says it blocked in recent months, plus hundreds of thousands of automated comments intercepted daily.

The button lives in the three-dot menu on any post. It’s not a policy channel. Sam Corrao Clannon, LinkedIn’s Creator Product Lead, defines the target as content “potentially sophisticated or polished in its presentation, but lacks substance”, “empty text that’s posted to take up space and garner attention without effort on the other side.” Corrao Clannon is explicit that the button is “not a reporting path for policy violations,” and Srinivasan says LinkedIn has “built safeguards to help prevent individual feedback from being used to unfairly target other members.” Using AI to refine your own writing remains fine. Posting the model’s output as if it were a thought is what the algorithm’s now discounting.

The scale of the underlying problem explains the aggression. In July, AI-detection firm Pangram called LinkedIn “the most AI-saturated platform,” finding more than 40% of long-form posts fully AI-generated and LinkedIn accounting for nearly two-thirds of all AI content it flagged across the web. Cloudflare reported in April that AI traffic had surpassed human traffic on the open web; by late August, bots made up 61.9% of search requests against 38.1% from humans. A mid-August Pew Research Center study of 10,000 pages collected in July found 10% showed significant signs of AI authorship, up from about 2% five years ago.

LinkedIn also killed its own “enhance your post” feature when the slop button shipped, replacing it with a proofreader that doesn’t rewrite voice. Authors will start seeing flag notifications inside their analytics dashboards, per an Engadget screenshot from Srinivasan. On a network of 1.3 billion registered users, the platform is now naming the penalty for outsourcing your posting to a model. For the five-to-thirty-person B2B shop that still writes its own material, the reach curve just bent the other way.

Sources