Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images for Cannes Lions
- New data suggests LinkedIn is filling up with AI-written content.
- Pangram estimates 41% of long-form LinkedIn posts and 30% of short-form ones are AI-generated.
- Podcast star Steven Bartlett stopped using AI on LinkedIn after noticing the prevalence of “slop.”
If you’re using AI to write your LinkedIn posts, you might want to reconsider.
New data from Pangram suggests LinkedIn has become inundated with AI content. The AI detection firm estimates that 41% of long-form LinkedIn posts and 30% of short-form ones were likely AI-generated, based on its data from April to June. LinkedIn had the highest average among the platforms it tracked, which included X, Reddit, Substack, and Medium.
One prominent creator who noticed this trend and reworked his LinkedIn strategy is “The Diary of a CEO” star Steven Bartlett.
His company, FlightStory, stopped using AI to write LinkedIn posts after noticing that AI was filling up the platform.
“You can really see the AI slop,” FlightStory CRO Christiana Brenton previously told Business Insider. “What Steven detected very early on, and as we did for all of our creators, is that when the world swings left, the opportunity is right. What’s going to cut through on LinkedIn now more than ever? Actual human-written words. So he now personally and the team write every single piece of social copy and content that goes out into the world.”
Posts performed better this way, the company said.
“You’ll even notice now if you do follow Steven, there’s spelling mistakes and errors, and he doesn’t fix them by design,” Brenton said. “When you’re inundated with AI content, it starts to feel less human.”
LinkedIn has moved aggressively to get people to use AI. When you start a new post, a prominent button appears that lets you polish it with AI.
However, the company said it’s taking steps to stop “slop” from proliferating.
“While AI can be a helpful tool for refining language, we’re seeing a rise in what many call ‘AI slop,’ content that is low-effort, AI-generated content that may sound polished on the surface but lacks any real unique perspective or substance,” the company wrote in June.
As companies race to adopt AI, some people have gotten more skeptical about the tech. Gartner found that half of the 1,539 people in the US it surveyed in October preferred to do business with companies that don’t use AI in their messaging.
We’ve reached the point where people are going to extreme lengths to prove they’re not a bot. A Use.AI survey this year found that 39% of 12,600 people surveyed across the US, UK, EU, and Latin America were going so far as to change how they wrote, specifically to avoid sounding AI, by shortening sentences and removing the telltale AI sign: em dashes. Yikes.
So go ahead, add AI skills to your profile. But when it comes to posting, you might want to follow Bartlett’s lead.
Â
