This Is Why LinkedIn Sucks Now
If you’re online, you know by now that AI slop isn’t limited to visuals-focused social media platforms. Even LinkedIn, an ostensibly career-focused social site, has become absolutely overrun with AI-generated posts, per two separate analyses.
Originality.ai and Pangram, two AI checkers, both say that more than 50% of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn use AI in one way or another, and around 41% of posts longer than 250 words are fully AI‑generated. While the results of Originality.ai’s analysis were published in October, they resurfaced after Pangram’s went up on Thursday.
LinkedIn’s culture helps drive this trend. The platform encourages writing longer posts and rewards those that incorporate both personal stories and business lessons (hence the meme, “What [insert bizarre scenario here] taught me about B2B sales.”) The easiest way to create those is with AI, which can easily mimic popular styles, resulting in feeds that are cluttered with posts that look and sound similar but don’t offer anything new or interesting.
Even comments on LinkedIn are nearly 24% AI-generated—a high ratio compared with Reddit, where only 1.7% of replies are written by AI. Even the folks at LinkedIn admit this is a problem, though they also acknowledge that AI detection tools have their flaws.
X (formerly Twitter) has a similar problem. Roughly a quarter of the platform’s posts are fully AI-generated, with more mixing human and machine writing.
In May, LinkedIn announced that it was “taking meaningful steps to crack down on automation tools, dial back on generic content, and strengthen authenticity” by identifying repetitive or generic content or responses, then “take action” against it. Pangram began its social media slop analysis two months ago via its AI-detecting Chrome extension, so it’s unclear how much LinkedIn’s changes have helped. Meanwhile, X now tags fully or partly AI-generated content as such.
