Recent data from AI/plagiarism detector Pangram showed that 41% of long-form posts and 30% of comments posted publicly on LinkedIn from April-June 2026 were entirely AI-generated.
If you are a LinkedIn user, this probably won’t surprise you. Anecdotally, we here at Tubefilter have seen a rise in content that’s obviously AI-generated–and a lot of that content is in the “thinkfluencing”/thought leadership sphere.
Thinkfluencers were omnipresent on LinkedIn for years before generative AI entered the scene. Their classic post style starts with a small moment (personal or professional) that they spin into a larger narrative, with the goal of showing off their expertise in their field.
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Since thinkfluencing is such a popular genre of post on LinkedIn and content within it has distinguishable hallmarks, people (some who previously wrote their own thinkfluencing content, others who are just running slop farms) are of course using generative AI to pump out as much of it as possible.
And LinkedIn, like many other major social media platforms, has realized this deluge might be bad for business.
“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,” Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s Chief Product Officer, said in an official post on the platform.
He went on to introduce LinkedIn’s new “Seems like AI slop” button, where users can directly report posts they think are generated. Per The Wall Street Journal, posters whose content is flagged with this button will get a “nudge.”
Srinivasan explained LinkedIn plans to test a way to privately show users when their posts have prompted (no pun intended) AI slop button usage.
“This approach is based on two learnings. First, AI and slop are not the same thing; many people refine thoughts with AI, and we believe they want to know when they sound inauthentic,” he said. “Second, we want members to get feedback from real humans on what sounds authentic–not just have an AI detector review it and get it wrong.”
LinkedIn is also introducing new classifiers in its automated system that “identify if a post is AI slop or other low-quality content” and keep it from being shown in recommendations, Srinivasan said. This means ideally, people won’t have to use the AI slop button much, since LinkedIn’s algorithm should catch and contain generated posts before they spread.
Last up, LinkedIn is walking back a feature called “Enhance your post,” which used LLM output to rewrite users’ posts for them, and replacing it with “a feature that proofreads your words, but does not change your voice,” Srinivasan said.
He explained that LinkedIn isn’t removing pre-post AI features entirely because “LinkedIn isn’t a one-word kind of place and [users] feel more confident running their posts through AI.”
LinkedIn is just the latest company to announce policy changes and updates that deal with generated content.
As we’ve extensively covered, platforms like YouTube and Facebook are contending with being in an awkward position. Their tech giant parents want to make boatloads of cash on the gen AI bubble, but that very same bubble is filling their social platforms (which provide the bulk of their income) with AI slop garbage, crowding out real creators.
What makes this different from YouTube and Facebook is that LinkedIn is text-based. Generated photos and videos remain somewhat detectable thanks to jank, but generated text doesn’t have the same visual AI flags. People have to detect it by recognizing patterns of phrasing (like good old “it’s not X, it’s Y”), which isn’t always easy.
Other text-based platforms are taking similar action: Substack introduced an AI-busting tool powered by the aforementioned Pangram, and as TechCrunch mentions, Digg was forced into complete restrategizing and significant layoffs when it couldn’t stop bots from filling its burgeoning Reddit competitor with slop.
“When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority,” the company said at the time. “Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us.”
