LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button (404media.co) 77
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: LinkedIn, a social network awash with long AI-generated posts from executives and other corporate workers, has introduced a new button that users can click to flag if a post "seems like AI slop," according to 404 Media's own tests. If you have been anywhere near LinkedIn in the past couple of years, you have undoubtedly seen users posting blatantly AI-generated missives. Often these posts take some sort of news event, and opine on how this relates to thought leadership, or some other LinkedIn brainrot term. It's also pretty wild the button specifically uses the term "AI slop" and not, say, "It seems this was generated with AI."
[...] After publication of this piece, Hari Srinivasan, chief product officer at LinkedIn, wrote their own post about the button. "AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this. People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas and expertise. Here are a few more changes to keep it that way," he wrote.
The button in part will help LinkedIn tune its own models for identifying AI slop. "We are ramping up a series of new and improved classifiers that identify if a post is AI-slop or generally low-quality content. This will reduce the amount of AI slop you might see in suggested content and content from outside your network," the post said. "We are ramping the ability for members to tell us if they believe a post or comment seems like AI slop. Slop is hard to define and the definition changes; this lets us tune our models and make better feeds." Srinivasan also said LinkedIn is removing the AI-powered "enhance your post" feature with another that "proofreads your words, but does not change your voice."
[...] After publication of this piece, Hari Srinivasan, chief product officer at LinkedIn, wrote their own post about the button. "AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this. People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas and expertise. Here are a few more changes to keep it that way," he wrote.
The button in part will help LinkedIn tune its own models for identifying AI slop. "We are ramping up a series of new and improved classifiers that identify if a post is AI-slop or generally low-quality content. This will reduce the amount of AI slop you might see in suggested content and content from outside your network," the post said. "We are ramping the ability for members to tell us if they believe a post or comment seems like AI slop. Slop is hard to define and the definition changes; this lets us tune our models and make better feeds." Srinivasan also said LinkedIn is removing the AI-powered "enhance your post" feature with another that "proofreads your words, but does not change your voice."
As opposed to human slop (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you look at the web... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's so refreshing to find a search result from an old web site maintained by a real person. It's like drowning in quicksand and suddenly feeling solid ground beneath your feet.
The other day I actually got a search result from everything2.com... Great feeling.
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You talk like SEO would not have been a problem before. Google is unusable since longer than AI can generate coherent sentences.
Re:As opposed to human slop (Score:5, Interesting)
And the "AI Slop" button is already being used to silence voices someone doesn't agree with. You see, when you click the button, it's removed from your feed and sent off for human review (yeah right, more likely it's an AI reviewing it and then, maybe, a human). While it's in review, it won't appear anywhere else.
If you see something you disagree with, mark it as AI Slop. Extra bonus points if you can get your bot farm to all do the same thing. Suddenly the post you dislike will be held up in review so long that no humans will ever see it - and the poster will never know, they just won't see any "engagement" and wonder why.
Linkedin was never a fair an equitable social network, but this just makes things even worse. Ironically, it won't help them identify what's human and what's AI either.
LI is the only social network I still use. I persevere with it like I do with slashdot, mainly for the nostalgia and occasionally for the comments. What I can say with certainty is though, like slashdot, the quality of LI has declined sharply. The value of it is much diminished, as evidenced by "promoted" being marked on every second post. It's actually a terrible place to get a job too, so one wonders just how much longer it can really survive.
Re:As opposed to human slop (Score:4, Interesting)
And the "AI Slop" button is already being used to silence voices someone doesn't agree with. You see, when you click the button, it's removed from your feed and sent off for human review (yeah right, more likely it's an AI reviewing it and then, maybe, a human)
It's a little like in here. I'll post objective truth, but since I pissed off someone that week that got some mod points, I get modded down. At least on Slashdot, it doesn't disappear.
Re: As opposed to human slop (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm in Fb jail right now, presumably for my political views, but they haven't actually told me what comment was problematic.
For it's many faults, at least slashdot the platform isn't known for opposing free speech like that
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Is "not able to post on Facebook" a good thing or a bad thing?
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Yes. And also and.
But bsky is an echo chamber and feceboot is not, and I want both things.
Twitter is too much of a cesspool to care that I got banned for saying mean things about Leon
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I'm in Fb jail right now, presumably for my political views, but they haven't actually told me what comment was problematic.
For it's many faults, at least slashdot the platform isn't known for opposing free speech like that
Back before Youtube became a little more inclusive I got banned from an address, and they wouldn't say why. As far as I can tell, it was a post I made about some women seem to always pick abusive mates. I must have been reported for that. Unfortunately, that is an objective truth. But not one that was politically correct at the time. So I pissed off someone that made a complaint, and that complaint landed on a person who shared that. Or maybe an algorithm issue - who knows?
https://www.psychologytoday.co... [psychologytoday.com]
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IDK man, there is one type of person that complains about being unfairly targeted wit these bans. If you got banned, its probably obvious. I mean have you seen the shit they didn't ban people for?
I suppose you could just claim I'm making shit up. I'm not complaining about being targeted unfairly, but allow me to explain.
If you get banned, then whine about it, saying "They're so mean!" That is complaining about being unfairly targeted. Exactly.
I noted I was, then surmising what I might have done wrong. In your world, is everyone of one mind? And all thinking in lockstep? And that any decision among all would be the same? Perhaps you live in an alternative universe of puppy dogs and rainbows.
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I mean have you seen the shit they didn't ban people for?
I mean have you seen the thing where Zuckerfuck called people who trusted him enough to give him their personal info for facebook "dumb fucks"? You should expect Facebook to intentionally not ban the worst people, if you are familiar with what a piece of shit Mark Fuckerberg is.
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I mean have you seen the shit they didn't ban people for?
I mean have you seen the thing where Zuckerfuck called people who trusted him enough to give him their personal info for facebook "dumb fucks"? You should expect Facebook to intentionally not ban the worst people, if you are familiar with what a piece of shit Mark Fuckerberg is.
Yes, I've seen downright seditious and threatening ov violent harm in a few groups, and the person suffers no consequence. Someone might have reported you for just having a different opinion. When spring outside of an echo chamber, people in the echo chamber go Reeee!
Especially if you answer certain groups who appear to enjoy "punishing" those who disagree with them. Some even enjoy the experience.
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You have to offend more than one person to get (and stay) modded down in /. , even if you believe you're posting the truth
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You have to offend more than one person to get (and stay) modded down in /. , even if you believe you're posting the truth
I know, right?
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You have to offend more than one person to get (and stay) modded down in /. , even if you believe you're posting the truth
That's not quite true. You only need to offend one person to get modded down. However, if you also provide value, then you will probably not stay modded down. My karma has only been anywhere other than right up against the kap a couple of times in the last... uh, long time.
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You have to offend more than one person to get (and stay) modded down in /. , even if you believe you're posting the truth
That's not quite true. You only need to offend one person to get modded down. However, if you also provide value, then you will probably not stay modded down. My karma has only been anywhere other than right up against the kap a couple of times in the last... uh, long time.
Agree. Sometimes my notifications are a war zone, with up and down mods. back and forth.
Re:As opposed to human slop (Score:4, Insightful)
Now assume a false positive. A user honestly marks something as "AI Slop" even though it is human slop. Now a human operator gets the post together with the bias "marked as 'AI slop'". They will not only see the same indicators that fooled the first human, but also have confirmation bias that 95% of what they get to see is AI generated, so this one probably is as well. Human moderation will not save you here.
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Why not just choose who you follow? Algorithmic feeds are the problem, they should let the people spam slop ... and keep it out of your feed, if you don't follow them.
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That's the solution they don't like. Rather exclude children and annoy people with content they didn't ask for than remove the anti-patterns. For modern social media you can't even call it enshittification as newer services have such features right from the start. They know exactly what they are doing.
And they intentionally give you some content that you dislike to stir engagement. Every "Slop! Slop yourself!" discussion means people spend time on their site discussing shit instead of touching grass.
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Linkedin was never a fair an equitable social network
Originaly, it was supposed to be a social network for making professional contacts. A noble endeavour, to be sure. But the forces of DEI and social credit just couldn't allow that to stand. It now has added the moderation features of the echo chamber type network. I.e., if you don't conform, you're outta here.
The A.I. slop arises from attempts by users to prepare reasonably sounding commentary without getting trapped in one of the many snares of "social acceptability". A.I. would seem to be pretty good at
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And the "AI Slop" button is already being used to silence voices someone doesn't agree with.
LinkedIn is (virtually) inhabited by humans, so - yes, of course it is.
Re:As opposed to human slop (Score:4, Funny)
I wonder if you can report the top-level linkedin.com as AI slop
Re:As opposed to human slop (Score:5, Insightful)
Reporting doesn't really work. It will be weaponized to suppress competing content and the reporting mechanism will become untrustworthy.
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If they did act on it, it would be a legal problem as soon as someone on the autism spectrum or otherwise non-neurotypical comes along. In fact I've been accused of being AI more than once, due to certain phrases that apparently AI is fond of. But that's just a mistake, once it happens to someone with a recognized medical condition it becomes discrimination.
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C3PO: "Bots reporting bots, how perverse!" [youtube.com]
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They would accomplish more if they added a button to label stuff not AI slop. It would lighten the load on their reporting system considerably.
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At least then there is an aggregate opinion that can be used to flag garbage content.
I tried this, but some self-saving depreciating bothole kept auto-rejecting my request for *.linkedin[dot]com..
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Isn't this just a button to help train better AI slop?
Disturbance in the force (Score:4, Funny)
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."
Suddenly, LinkedIn is empty ..
Billy Mays Plugin (Score:3)
Make every post like Billy Mays.
It would be an improvement.
Re:Why is Microsoft doing this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe someone in the org actually cares about linkedin's reputation as a hellscape for aura-farming lunatics; but I'd be shocked if the incentive that MS is actually motivated by is anything but the chance to get a dataset of text ranked by how unpleasantly bot-like it is to try to make their bots less visible.
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so that they can tune their copilot-related stuff to produce less grating or less obvious slop in the future
https://xkcd.com/810/ [xkcd.com]
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It's probably a way to prevent model collapse [wikipedia.org]. So they don't train LLMs on data that has been generated by LLMs.
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They want to avoid consuming AI output as training material for their AI. They don't want to pay money for classification. This way they can get users to do the classification in exchange for the hope that it will be hidden.
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They're using this data to train their models so that future AI content is more difficult to detect.
Ah, I see. (Score:2)
The winning move is not to play.
Re:Ah, I see. (Score:5, Interesting)
Know Your Role. (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuck LinkedIn.
Fuck it right back into the social media cesshole it manifested from.
I don't need this kind of AI-tainted pain, to simply find a fucking job.
Any real employer will agree; you don't need this kind of pain, to simply find a fucking employee.
LinkedIn exists today for human employment. The answer for AI on that platform, is an outright ban. Not a fucking feel-good button.
"Seems like" (Score:2)
Makes me think we should apply the CFAA to AI (Score:3)
Traditionally, we've all been skeptical of the CFAA being applied to ToS violations, but I think there is a reasonable case to be made for a carve out to reform the CFAA to make it a crime to attach a bot that posts to a web site after their ToS prohibits writing.
Reading should still be a civil tort unless a scraper continuously imposes real costs or outages, but I think it would be very beneficial to establish a clear line that it absolutely can be a misdemeanor or even a felony to attach bots who write data when the ToS forbids that.
Genai (Score:4, Insightful)
"It's also pretty wild the button specifically uses the term "AI slop" and not, say, "It seems this was generated with AI."
It makes sense. They don't care if the content is AI generated, this is not a moral stance because linkedin doesn't do those. This is people complaining about slop and LinkedIn pretending to care
while they're doing that... (Score:2)
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Regenerate Brandan Eich?
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Re: What about WOKE SLOP? All LinkedIn is WOKE SLO (Score:1)
What happened to you? Is this long COVID?
ai slop (Score:2)
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It seems like an unnecessary button. LinkedIn already has an icon that labels slop posts generally. It's a blue field with white letters "in".
So LinkedIn now demands free labor? (Score:2)
But I think that's not the real goal here. I think the real goal is to find out which AI slop escapes detection and use that information to fine-tune their models to crank out even more AI slop, so that -- eventually -- LinkedIn has almost no human-generated content. A lot of people will leave, of course, but those who remain will be
Facebook is better? (Score:2)
Poor moderators (Score:2)
The poor moderators. They'd have much less content to review if the button were "Doesn't Seem like AI Slop"
Adventures in bad reading (Score:2)
When I first read that, I thought I saw "other corporate wankers".
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well, actually...
Youtube needs a Slop button (Score:5, Insightful)
Mice In Flames (Score:2)
Logitec reports massive uptick in mouse warranty claims. A massive number of users report that their mouse spontaneously combusted. Commonality seems to be that the mouse fires all occurred while the users were on the LinkedIn website.
Not enough (Score:1)
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How about a "this whole site is AI slop" button?
Who even uses it? (Score:2)
Who even uses LinkedIn? I've been in the workforce in a technical role for 33 years and have not once used it. A couple of times that I clicked on a link to someone's LinkedIn profile, it wouldn't show me anything but a nag screen telling me to log in. Nope.
Of course (Score:1)
Problems (Score:2)
The first problem is, the button is technically a Down-vote Button and will be used by extremists to hide facts they don't want other people to know.
Second problem is, the audience is providing quality assurance for Microsoft. Every LLM needs to prevent feedback loops or it spouts an endless stream of nonsense and bullshit. By making the audi
The AI agenrs totally won't click (Score:2)
This new button on other posts. Or so I'm told.
First things first (Score:2)
How about a button that marks an unsolicited connection requests as spam. Garbage connection requests are worse than people posting AI slop, because I never look at the "feed".