Linkedin and the AI Slop Option

LinkedIn has introduced the ability to report a post as AI Slop. After adding the ability to use AI Assist to write posts in the first place. Have they lost their minds, or are they catering to the mindless masses?

So, the latest topic on LinkedIn today is the brand new option OMG OMG to report a post as ‘AI Slop’.

Groundbreaking.

Especially as they added a feature to assist writers with AI in the first place.

Now - I can’t rant about this on LinkedIn, because that would just contribute to the noise and frankly there is enough of that shit already, so I thought I’d abuse my own blog to do it here instead.

The absolute insanity of this is that only a week ago, experts were crawling out of the fucking woodwork to show off how they could spot an AI post from miles away, thanks to their - I don’t know - minutes of leadership and writing expertise.

The bloody management hellhole from the vast depths of Satan’s arsecrack was awash with the lazy cretins confidently stating that they could spot AI slop purely due to the prevalence of em-dashes and “It’s not X, it’s Y” formatting.

These benighted imbeciles absolutely hammered the feed with this mindless bollocks, stated with the confidence that only someone with absolutely no critical thinking skills or self respect could muster.

And, of course, in the wake of this relentless tide of shit came the calls to be able to flag posts as AI generated. I suspect that the majority of writers thought LinkedIn would do this for them, like some magical fairytale grandma, and make all their problems go away at a stroke.

Sadly, the thought goblins forgot that despite pretending to act in their interests, LinkedIn is an entirely self serving entity which will happily promote any level of mindless gobshitery as long as it drives engagement. A description that equally applied to all the self promoting stinking garbage these same idiots were producing in the weeks prior to all the AI hatred.

As AI slop in any format - em-dashes, funfair posters, or multi-fingered horror images pretending to be marketing material - quickly drew the shrieking multitudes, these fucking idiots were promoting the very content that they claimed to hate, from up there in their ivory towers. Of course, lacking self-awareness of any kind, they continued to drive the cycle while begging for the posts to be magically flagged.

So LinkedIn - the mindless hydra that it is - gave them the feature that they asked for, but with a twist.

People on LinkedIn could now flag posts as ‘AI Slop’ themselves!

Oh! imagine the joy that erupted from the platform as so many slack jawed drooling morons loudly proclaimed the existence of this feature! “I thought it was a joke, but it’s true!” was the common refrain.

Fantastic. Talentless bottom-dwelling lungfish were now equipped with the ability to judge others’ writing from afar, with absolutely no requirement to possess any skill themselves. As you can imagine, this sparked both horror and immense fury in me.

It’s been a while. Let’s get into it.

First off, cretinland and its multitude of inhabitants proudly posted the little menu of options that now included the “AI Slop reporting” option. They managed to do this with so little self awareness that they retained the other options - the ability to report a post if it was genuinely harmful, and the less ragebait inducing “not interested in this post” choice.

That was the horror part. Options already existed to ignore this shit, but that apparently didn’t apply to the lobotomised mouth breathers. They had found a way to express their displeasure in the most harmful way possible.

So, onto the fury bit.

By exercising their apparently god-given right to banish a post to the depths of the ocean purely because they thought it was written by AI, they seemed to forget that they were now acting as the very gatekeepers they were complaining about before. You see, flagging a post raised the chances of it being removed. For everybody.

Rather than - oh, I don’t know - just fucking ignoring it, or even just marking it as ’not interested’, the army of Karens decided that they should be the parties who were allowed to decide what the rest of us poor sadsacks got to see.

A nice, fresh, AI-free field in which Kevin from accounts can post that he is ‘delighted to announce my promotion to chief cook, bottle washer, and floor scrubber’ or whatever the fuck else counts for the swill that populates 95% of this fucking site.

Anyway, the Karens of the LinkedIn world have decided that they have been granted the long overdue power to burn books, deface adverts, silence critics, and generally globally remove the voices they don’t agree with, and this is a good thing.

Which, pardon my French, is absolutely fucking retarded. It’s bullshit of the highest order.

And to imagine that this was a gift handed down from the gods on high is also an extensive exercise in the force of delusional thinking, because I can absolutely guarantee that this feature was created by a mid-level powerless eejit whose next KPI is to “raise engagement by users”.

And by Christ has he got it.

I can feel the rage recede. I have spent my well of discontinuity. I have expressed my disgust with the world once more, and I don’t have to do it ever again.

Well, I can hope, that’s for sure… but I’m certain that I’ll have reason to again real soon.

It’s a shame that I seem to have convinced myself that the glorious sunny uplands of my future are somewhat dependent on this bloody platform, because it’s like being dependent on someone for income while they repeatedly stab you in the face and shove landmines through your letterbox.

Back next week. fuck this shit.