Have you noticed LinkedIn’s new ‘Seems like AI slop’ button?
My initial reaction was to snigger. The amount of obviously curated, AI-generated content flooding my inbox has been driving me crazy for months, so a button that lets people call it out felt like a small win. But now I’ve had time to reflect, I’m not convinced it’s quite so funny, or that it’s an effective solution to the problem it’s trying to solve.
‘Slop’ is nothing new
Even before AI, there was plenty of rubbish content circulating on LinkedIn. Back then, as now, the solution was simple – ignore it, delete it, or unfollow the source. The platform didn’t need to intervene, because the community managed it themselves.
At Limey Towers, this has long been a topic of conversation. We’ve always believed that leaning too heavily on AI to produce content is a mistake. It flattens your voice and it’s easy to spot. Our view hasn’t changed. What has changed is the stakes.
A new reason to care
There’s now another reason to think carefully about how you use AI in your content – the possibility of being penalised by LinkedIn itself.
The platform has said policing will be down to its members. But is it really sensible to hand the masses control of something so powerful? What’s stopping a group of users from mass-flagging a rival’s content out of spite? Or a competitor using the button to knock a well-performing post out of the running?
Crowd-sourced moderation sounds democratic in theory. In practice, it’s only as fair as the crowd doing the moderating and LinkedIn’s crowd includes plenty of people with a commercial interest in who gets seen and who doesn’t.
Not everyone’s a writer
I’m confident when it comes to writing. It’s what I do for a living. But it isn’t everyone’s bag and AI genuinely has a place in helping people find their voice, structure their thinking, or simply get started when a blank page feels daunting.
Should those people be named and shamed for using a legitimate tool? Will we now see a chilling effect, with users retreating into the virtual shadows for fear of being ‘found out’, even when what they’ve written is honest, useful and their own thinking, just AI-assisted in the delivery?
The real motive?
There’s plenty of speculation that LinkedIn has released this function as a way of training its own AI model, essentially getting its users to tell it, for free, what ‘good’ content looks like. If that’s the case, this isn’t really about protecting the quality of your feed at all. It’s about harvesting the judgement of millions of unpaid moderators to sharpen a commercial product.
Whether or not that’s the intention, it feels like the opening of a Pandora’s box that LinkedIn may find harder to close than it was to open.
Where Limegreen comes in
This is exactly the kind of grey area we help clients navigate every day. AI isn’t going anywhere and used well it’s a genuinely useful tool for research, structure and getting past a blank page. But there’s a real difference between AI-assisted content and AI-generated content – and that difference is your voice.
At Limegreen, we work with clients to build and protect that voice, so it comes through consistently whether it’s a LinkedIn post, a press release, or a thought leadership report and so it doesn’t sound like it could have been written by anyone, or anything, else. We use AI where it earns its place, but the thinking, the judgement and the words that carry your brand are always ours.
If you’re rethinking how AI fits into your content strategy or want a second opinion on whether your current output still sounds like you, we’d love to talk.
Get in touch with Limegreen Communications to talk content strategy by emailing jo@limegreencommunications.com or call 07799 662389
