LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button (404media.co)
- Reference: 0184781260
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/07/31/0540241/linkedin-introduces-a-seems-like-ai-slop-button
- Source link: https://www.404media.co/linkedin-introduces-a-seems-like-ai-slop-button/
> LinkedIn, a social network awash with [1]long AI-generated posts from executives and other corporate workers, has introduced a new button that [2]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."
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> [...] After publication of this piece, Hari Srinivasan, chief product officer at LinkedIn, [3]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.
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> 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."
[1] https://slashdot.org/story/24/11/27/1738240/linkedin-posts-are-now-mostly-ai-written-study-shows
[2] https://www.404media.co/linkedin-introduces-a-seems-like-ai-slop-button/
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hsrinivasan1_ai-slop-is-a-top-priority-for-all-of-us-share-7488612006321889282-Ps8Z/
Disturbance in the force (Score:3)
"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:2)
Make every post like Billy Mays.
It would be an improvement.
Re:Why is Microsoft doing this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that Microsoft, not unreasonably, thinks that the value of their AI slop will be enhanced if they can use an existing property to get people to classify particularly grating AI slop so that they can tune their copilot-related stuff to produce less grating or less obvious slop in the future.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
> so that they can tune their copilot-related stuff to produce less grating or less obvious slop in the future
[1]https://xkcd.com/810/ [xkcd.com]
[1] https://xkcd.com/810/
Re: (Score:2)
It's probably a way to prevent [1]model collapse [wikipedia.org]. So they don't train LLMs on data that has been generated by LLMs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse
Ah, I see. (Score:2)
Looks like Microsoft is trying to convince people to classify more and less distasteful bot slop for them so they can tune copilot outputs in the future.
The winning move is not to play.
Re:Ah, I see. (Score:4, Interesting)
Or the flag keeps their models from training on their own output and helps to avoid [1]model collapse. [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse
Know Your Role. (Score:3)
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)
"Seems like" means you don't really know, which means the AI is getting so good that it's fooling the users of the site. If that's the case, why report anything?
Makes me think we should apply the CFAA to AI (Score:2)
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 da
Genai (Score:2)
"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)
...they should stop recommending jobs that "might be a good match" that I clearly would not be. Also, when I set a minimum salary, they should stop recommending jobs that are, you know, below my minimum salary.
Re: (Score:2)
Regenerate Brandan Eich?
Re: (Score:2)
Go take a big shit for yourself.
ai slop (Score:2)
So thats going to take linkedin to only 3 or post a day if you get rid of the slot. Lets start with the linkedin getting rid of the stupid games. NO I dont want to play farmville with my coworkings or any other game.
Re: (Score:2)
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)
I suppose that's cheaper and easier than using their own AI slop detectors -- doubly so because that would require hiring actual real live people and paying them suitably.
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)
Switched jobs years ago. Now am a simple high-school teacher. That used to be different. So I have a lot of relatively high profiles on my linked in. I see posts passing by in the overly optimistic typical linked in style. (I am thrilled to announce a new opportunity blabla). So as a matter of parody, I asked chatgpt to write a summary of my newest achievement: correcting 265 exams. Of course I needed some buzz words, so I asked it to also mention that I was experimenting with Ai to help correct and that it
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".
Youtube needs a Slop button (Score:2)
It also needs AI warnings.
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.
As opposed to human slop (Score:4, Insightful)
LinkedIn provides both. Anyhoo, every platform should have a button which is able to report slop, scam ads, copyright infringment and other things without the bullshit of filling out a lengthy form that will be denied. At least then there is an aggregate opinion that can be used to flag garbage content.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
You talk like SEO would not have been a problem before. Google is unusable since longer than AI can generate coherent sentences.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
> 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:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Aggregate means a site can work out the number of views to people pushing the button and take a good guess. Especially if other content from the same channel also gets flagged. And it can be weighted against site reputation, engagement and other metrics. Being able to report slop is way overdue.
Re: (Score:2)
> 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
Re: (Score:2)
You're kidding I hope. LinkedIn is just a really shitty social media network and has its equivalent of blueticks where assholes and grifters can pay money to elevate their stupid opinions to the top of feeds. If there is any political slant to this crap it is to the right, but it does not follow that slop should be allowed to make things even worse.
Re: (Score:2)
As I said "aggregate" and it can be reviewed. In addition, why is this any different than when social media offers thumbs down, or "do not recommend" or other mechanisms?
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if you can report the top-level linkedin.com as AI slop
Re: (Score:3)
Reporting doesn't really work. It will be weaponized to suppress competing content and the reporting mechanism will become untrustworthy.
Re: (Score:1)
C3PO: [1]"Bots reporting bots, how perverse!" [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr9s6-tuppI
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
> 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..
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't this just a button to help train better AI slop?