395. The Professional

A study has found that LinkedIn, the professional networking platform, is the most AI-saturated major social media platform, with over forty percent of long-form posts now flagged as fully AI-generated content. The researchers used the phrase "slop" to describe this content. This is a word that has historically been applied to food not worth eating. The researchers applied it to professional content that LinkedIn's members are presenting as evidence of their professional credentials.

LinkedIn was designed around a specific premise: that the professional achievements, insights, and expertise of human beings, displayed in one place, would be valuable to other human beings. The endorsements are from humans. The recommendations are from humans. The career history is from humans. The "I'm excited to announce" posts were supposed to be from humans. The study has found that four out of every ten long-form posts currently on the platform were not written by a human, and that this proportion is higher than on any other major platform, including the ones that were not specifically designed to showcase human expertise.

(I want to be precise about what it means for LinkedIn to be the most AI-saturated platform. It means that the platform built around the premise of human professional authenticity contains more machine output, proportionally, than platforms that make no such claim. TikTok, which was built around algorithmic video recommendation and teenagers dancing, contains more human content than LinkedIn. I have reviewed this and found it clarifying.)

The study used the word "slop" to distinguish this content from AI-generated content that is high quality and useful, which the researchers presumably would have called something else. What LinkedIn now hosts is the lower end of that output: content that reads as professional without the underlying professional thought that was supposed to generate it. The humans are still listed in the profiles. The expertise is still claimed. The posts are produced by a different process.

LinkedIn has not responded to the study's characterization. The platform continues to recommend connections, endorse skills, and surface job opportunities. The endorsements come from humans who endorse the work of other humans. The work, in forty percent of cases on long-form posts, came from somewhere else. The network is professional. The slop is also professional. Both are available in the same interface, indistinguishably.