LinkedIn Is Done Hosting Content Nobody Wrote

LinkedIn has offered artificial intelligence content tools to its over 1.3 billion members for more than two years. Now it is training a different kind of AI to find and suppress what those tools helped produce.

Content creation on the platform is up 14% year over year, LinkedIn Vice President and Executive Editor Laura Lorenzetti, per a May 19 Entrepreneur report. Much of it has started to look and sound the same. Feeds that once surfaced human perspective now return something closer to a single synthetic voice. They’re polished, AI-generated posts that sound vaguely inspirational and say nothing.

LinkedIn is changing its recommendation systems, targeting what it calls “AI slop,” or posts and comments that lack original perspective, the report said. Flagged content won’t be removed but will be suppressed so it doesn’t spread beyond a user’s immediate network. The crackdown extends to comments. Bot-generated and generic AI replies that do little more than summarize the posts they’re responding to are also in scope.

“When AI is overused, especially at scale and in an automated way, it dilutes the valuable insights that real human conversations can spark,” Lorenzetti said in a May 20 blog post. “It’s OK to use AI to help you write, but your posts and comments need to represent your voice and your perspectives. The ultimate value comes from the human behind the tool.”

The irony is difficult to ignore. LinkedIn’s parent company, Microsoft, has been among the most aggressive promoters of generative AI tools across its product suite. LinkedIn itself offers a prominent “rewrite with AI” button in its post composer.

The company is not trying to penalize users for using AI, only for posting content that lacks original insight, according to the Entrepreneur report.

AI Solving AI

The detection system correctly flagged generic AI-generated content 94% of the time in early tests, Lorenzetti said in the blog post. However, TNW reported May 20 that the company has not shared data on false positives. How often legitimate posts get wrongly suppressed remains an open question.

The rollout could take several months before users see a change, as the company continues to refine its detection systems, Lorenzetti said, per the Entrepreneur report.

The system was built by LinkedIn’s engineers working alongside its in-house editorial team, trained to identify patterns that distinguish posts adding genuine perspective from those that recycle existing ideas without contributing anything new, the report said. Engagement bait phrases like “Comment yes if you agree” or “Tag a friend who needs this” are also targeted, as are automated tools that generate AI content at scale.

LinkedIn drew a deliberate line, The Media Copilot reported May 18. AI-assisted content is still welcome, provided it contains original ideas or sparks meaningful conversation, but that’s a narrower exemption than it sounds.

A Platform-Wide Reckoning

LinkedIn isn’t alone. YouTube announced in July that repetitive, mass-produced content qualifies as inauthentic and is ineligible for monetization, SEO Sherpa reported. The company subsequently removed 16 major channels from its Partner Program in January due to mass-generated videos. TikTok and Meta have also enforced rules requiring creators to label AI-generated content.

The pattern is consistent. Platforms that competed to offer the most capable AI creation tools are now competing to build the most capable AI detection systems.

Initial results from LinkedIn’s crackdown are encouraging, and the company expects further declines in low-quality AI content, Lorenzetti said in the blog post.

“Members have shared they are already seeing fewer of these types of posts in their feeds, and we expect that to continue over time,” she said.

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