Over 1 million people clicked LinkedIn’s ‘seems like AI slop’ button as the platform fights to keep ‘dead internet theory’ from becoming reality

In a bid to combat the growing presence of AI-generated content on its platform, LinkedIn has introduced a "seems like AI slop" button, allowing users to flag posts that appear to be AI-generated. In the initial two weeks since the feature's launch, over a million users have utilized this tool, according to LinkedIn Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan. Since its inception, members have experienced a 40% decrease in views on content classified as AI slop compared to a few weeks earlier.

Srinivasan emphasized that while progress has been made, the company remains committed to ensuring LinkedIn serves as a platform for genuine people and perspectives. The dead internet theory, which gained popularity in the late 2010s, has evolved into a mainstream concern as AI and bots proliferate online spaces, and the evidence suggests that bot activity is indeed on the rise.

Rudy Yang, an enterprise and retail fintech analyst at Pitchbook, noted that evidence points to the presence of more bot activity, with AI surpassing human users in web traffic for the first time.

A Pew Research Center study revealed that 10% of 10,000 webpages collected in July 2026 displayed significant signs of AI authorship, a marked increase from around 2% five years prior. This trend is particularly evident on LinkedIn, where AI detection startup Pangram found that more than 40% of its longform posts were flagged as completely AI-generated, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the total flagged content.

To address the issue, LinkedIn plans to enhance profile and page verification, remove the "enhance your post" feature that allowed users to edit posts with AI, and instead introduce a proofreading feature. The platform also intends to combat the surge of AI-generated content by expanding its efforts to ensure the authenticity and quality of user-generated content.