AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn

LinkedIn is totally useless at this point.

- If you're a job seeker, most of the jobs are fake for pretend growth optics. - If you're a senior level or executive you're targeted non-stop by sales people telling you about "the conversations they're having ..." - If you're looking for actual thought leadership or interesting information, you're bombarded with random tik-tok style videos, totally contrived stories and "lessons" to how ordering at Starbucks is like managing cloud infrastructure

It's turned into a completely artificial and useless community because Microsoft chased the same growth and engagement metrics as Facebook did, now no one considers it to be a place for serious discussion.

I'm convinced that the internet is mostly dead at this point. Sites like reddit or this one don't ask people for their identity. Nothing on here could be real and we'd be none the wiser.

AI content is everywhere period, conditioning people and other AI in the propagation of more AI content.

I started to see articles about mycorrhizal fungi pop up on sites and LLMs. In January of 2026 an evolutionary biologist won a prize regarding the fungi, there were some interviews and media items surrounding it. But then I could trace the original media items to AI content aggregators, which led to other AI generated posts about mycorrhizal fungi, and some of that entered LLM training data, causing LLMs to bring up the topic.

And here I am, a human, writing about it, which may get consumed into training pipelines and help disseminate the idea into the future even further.

The average type of person that still engages on LinkedIn won't even notice, so there's that...

Beyond the OP's AI-written or AI assisted distinction, I'm also noticing people mimicking LLM's speech patterns. I've read blogs from people who I'm quite sure are above pasting AI output directly into their words who nevertheless are sounding more and more like AI as the sum of all their conversations with Claude begins to rub off on them (myself included, probably)

Maybe I don't use LinkedIn that much, but I saw it especially on X and Reddit... Just today I was on a Reddit post and saw so many AI sloppish comments from people trying to farm karma

My feeling is that it interferes a lot with "the social media algorithms" and hence with the "infinite wall of random stuff from people you don't know".

In the last few years I have been going back to RSS feeds, subscribing to blogs I like. What I lose there is that I don't get suggestions for blogs I don't already know.

I genuinely wonder if there could be an opportunity for webrings there. Like blogs could have an RSS feed of "blogs I follow" by the author, and I could choose to follow them or at least visit them and selectively subscribe.

The thing is that many times, there is one article I like in a blog but not necessarily the rest. So more than "blogs I follow", it could be "articles I liked". So that if I subscribe to the RSS feed of someone, I get exposed to articles they "bookmarked", and eventually it can help me discover blogs I want to subscribe to.

Or maybe it all exists already. Or used to exist, probably.

It amusing that Musk attempted to reverse his purchase of Twitter by citing the number of bots, and then research like this comes out alleging that now 29% of the X's long form articles are fully AI.

It's not exactly the same thing, of course, but still interesting the extent to which this type of content is viewed as the business opportunity for him.

Pangram doesn't work, and I wish people would stop treating it as gospel (but the AI/anti-AI grift is real). Here's a fun paradox: I can literally tell ChatGPT: "Say X" and it will say "X"—so that's a case where content is both AI generated and not. What if it changes a few words? Moves some sentences around? Where does something go from human- to AI-generated? (This is the classic Sorites paradox.)

Pangram tries to look for common patterns (rule of three, em dashes, etc.) but these are heuristic methods and not to be taken as gospel. There is no provable method to make a distinction between AI and human-generated other than the fact that AI-generated text tends to reek of pseudo-intellectual undergrad with a thesaurus.

Can confirm, this pushed me to delete the LinkedIn a few months ago and haven't looked back. It was at one time a professional portfolio, now I consider it a huge red flag if a company even questions why I do not have a LinkedIn. If you want references I will provide them. Social media is not a job requirement for any position I'm interested in.

I find it kind of concerning that it's so much better to have serious (eg scientific or emotionally charged) discussions with a bot than with any human at all, online or in real life.

Also, in case you didn't already know, I saw a headline announcing that the sky is usually blue.

Was just thinking today, -- happened to login to LinkedIn, open it up and the entire front page is just AI slop being applauded and liked with people seriously interacting with it as if it's somebody didn't just shit it out in 20s with zero effort. The whole thing needs to die so badly.

On Instagram, I'll get fed "real" content, but you read the description and it's this giant 3-4 paragraph thing that I don't bother to read because I know with certainty that it's AI slop. Before AI, the descriptions of sports videos or meme videos were 2 sentences, now they're entire theses.

The only people left reading this crap are people that still haven't caught up with the concept of AI slop

LinkedIn is definitely flooded with AI slop, but we also need to keep in mind that Pangram really doesn't work that well. I just tried it, wrote a few sentences about my day, and it was flagged as AI-generated (which doesn't surprise me since these tools are known to easily flag writing from people whose native language is not English [1]). I am really suspicious of the 0.1% false positive rate they claim to achieve.

[1] https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-detectors-biased-against-no...

Oh yeah I can't wait for the next election. Things get so toxic when money/power is involved.

The LinkedIn feed was Moltbook before anyone had the idea for Moltbook.

LinkedIn is basically unusable at this point. I actually did used to use it a fair amount before but I've since deleted it and just use email notifications to see any notifications from recruiters.

What I don't get is how these people don't feel shame in their super obvious blatant use of LLMs for everything, even responding to posts. Maybe it's just me but when I'm attaching things to my name like that, I would absolutely not want everything to be obviously slop shit. Do they think people can't tell or something? I know at least every technical person I know can immediately tell (most of the time) when writing is LLM generated.

almost all platforms are like this now. Every active player in each of these platform is trying to get the most eyeballs in their content / profile. and the silent scrollers are not contributing anything else anyway.

We've societally come to the consensus that, we want to reward a race to the bottom slop. passive scrollers by not doing anything about it, active posters by contributing to it.

but there is no way else to win in this game.

A friend of mine writes the most human curated thoughtful newsletter about AI, spending 100 hours. and maybe 200 people know of its existence.

It's like a burgoo [1]. A steaming cauldron of community slop.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgoo

I mean, who the hell ever read that utter garbage on LinkedIn anyway?

Tbh I’ve always treated it as three things:

1) Glorified Rolodex

2) Place too see which of my peers got promoted or moved dormant

3) Source material for /r/linkedinlunatics

Reading the crap in the feed has never been a thing

LinkedIn has become an AI-slopped wasteland. It’s like the opposite of when boomers found Facebook, which was the weirdest melting pot of zero-integrity posts and comments.

Now we have these tech-savvy people generating worthless images and producing generic, emoji-infested takeaways.

It's still pretty bad at pixel art, and just has this generic look visually. I remember watching this video of this indy game developer that tried to hire an artist for some visuals for cover art for his game, and kept getting sent AI generated stuff by scammers. Finally he did find a real artist, and the cover was really good. But expensive.

" but we don't believe it's inevitable." Best get believing pal, because not only is it inevitable, it represents the last evolution in our societies output. There will be slop from now until eternity. Recalibrate your aesthetics, because everything is going to look like model output. The detection model is flawed, and snake-oil at best. 仕方がない (shikata ga nai).

AI generated article to promote some product. What a great meta proof.

The question is not whether something is AI generated. That's the default state now. Question whether it is human, the economics are exceedingly in the favor of this new normal. https://javiergonzalez.io/blog/the-economics-of-slop/

the enslopification is pretty obnoxious.

On LinkedIn it's the only place where AI slop will be a huge improvement over the previous content.

Really no different than the content that is usually on LinkedIn. It's been a worthless dumpster fire for ten years at least.

I especially detest the constant romanticization of losing sleep, injuries, and abusing oneself to achieve a business result, which seems to be a constant theme of most of this AI generated content. Some of the incidents might be real but they shouldn't be romanticized.

Without naming names I saw one post where a certain team was taken to a high altitude location to lock down together and the founder was proud of people using oxygen and still getting work done.

Are we working for AI or is AI working for us?

This isn't just a spam problem, it's a technology making mediocre content economically viable at unprecedented scale. /s

If I see a post that starts with this type of sentence structure I don't even bother to read any of it. I feelt like this happens on LinkedIn the most, so I'm happy to finally have some data to back up my observations.

AI content is everywhere period, conditioning people and other AI in the propagation of more AI content.

And here I am, a human, writing about it, which may get consumed into training pipelines and help disseminate the idea into the future even further.

The average type of person that still engages on LinkedIn won't even notice, so there's that...

My feeling is that it interferes a lot with "the social media algorithms" and hence with the "infinite wall of random stuff from people you don't know".

In the last few years I have been going back to RSS feeds, subscribing to blogs I like. What I lose there is that I don't get suggestions for blogs I don't already know.

Or maybe it all exists already. Or used to exist, probably.

I find it kind of concerning that it's so much better to have serious (eg scientific or emotionally charged) discussions with a bot than with any human at all, online or in real life.

Also, in case you didn't already know, I saw a headline announcing that the sky is usually blue.

The only people left reading this crap are people that still haven't caught up with the concept of AI slop

[1] https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-detectors-biased-against-no...

The LinkedIn feed was Moltbook before anyone had the idea for Moltbook.

We've societally come to the consensus that, we want to reward a race to the bottom slop. passive scrollers by not doing anything about it, active posters by contributing to it.

but there is no way else to win in this game.

A friend of mine writes the most human curated thoughtful newsletter about AI, spending 100 hours. and maybe 200 people know of its existence.

I mean, who the hell ever read that utter garbage on LinkedIn anyway?

Tbh I’ve always treated it as three things:

1) Glorified Rolodex

2) Place too see which of my peers got promoted or moved dormant

3) Source material for /r/linkedinlunatics

Reading the crap in the feed has never been a thing

AI generated article to promote some product. What a great meta proof.

On LinkedIn it's the only place where AI slop will be a huge improvement over the previous content.

Without naming names I saw one post where a certain team was taken to a high altitude location to lock down together and the founder was proud of people using oxygen and still getting work done.

Are we working for AI or is AI working for us?

LinkedIn is totally useless at this point.

To be fair it’s been pretty useful for me for finding jobs by looking for a relevant person and messaging them. I don’t do it very often and have probably > 50% rate of a cold message leading to further discussions (just to indicate I’m not spamming and only doing it when there’s a real possibility of a fit).

That aside I used to scroll it fairly often to see updates or relevant posts. But it’s some combination of algorithm and LLMs, the feed is now useless, it’s all just people I don’t know posting slope about someone “just said the quiet part out loud” or whatever, with the obligatory GPT slop photo. It’s unrecognizable vs a few years ago.

> If you're a job seeker, most of the jobs are fake for pretend growth optics.

Maybe, but it continues to be one of the best places to find work.

Where is? I've gotten about 2 interviews via Linkedin, wellfound has little which are the two I know most, Indeed is more useless than even LinkedIn.

I used to have decent luck with Who is hiring threads but not recently as there's relatively little for mid level engineers.

In my view, LinkedIn has never really been a place for serious discussion.

I'm convinced that the internet is mostly dead at this point. Sites like reddit or this one don't ask people for their identity. Nothing on here could be real and we'd be none the wiser.

Product and service reviews are completely useless now too, and have been for a while. Restaurant ratings are pure noise, everything is 4 stars and there is absolutely no correlation to the quality of food or service. None of it is real.

It's bleak out there, on the internet.

I can't tell if your comment is LLM generated or not. What's the point of even reading comments anymore I should just ask claude what it thinks.

If I can't tell the difference, why would it matter?

The problem is when I can eventually tell the difference.

I'm real xutopia. I'm real.

Social Media, Especially Reddit, is getting worse by the minute, vibe coding spam, AI bots filling subs with AI garbage links & comments, mods calling it quit because of the amount of junk they have to deal with it. IT IS EVERYWHERE... AI music on Spotify, AI pull requests on github, AI videos on youtube,... it's gonna kill the internet...

I might be a dog for all you know (though I neither confirm nor deny this), but I assure you I'm real.

I have noticed that sometimes in lists I have had the "The ... Solution: ..." sort of repetition. It is probably pre-existing but now that LLMs overuse it I actually am trying to adapt my speech patterns to not, because patterns LLMs overuse quickly become very grating to me.

I suppose it stands to reason: LLMs were trained on human writing, and overuse certain tropes and patterns because those patterns are commonly represented in human writing. But many people aren't particularly adept writers, and they're going to turn to AI to either do their writing or inform how they write. The trope ends up reinforcing itself as people just start to think that AI output is just what normal writing looks like.

I caught myself saying "push back" the other day. I've never said it before, it's a Claude-ism.

Maybe I don't use LinkedIn that much, but I saw it especially on X and Reddit... Just today I was on a Reddit post and saw so many AI sloppish comments from people trying to farm karma

Twitter and Reddit were already on their way to being terrible, but the automation of the worst of what those places were becoming is now available to everyone.

Pangram does work, in the specific sense that when it says something was AI authored it is vanishingly unlikely that it was written by a human (who was not deliberately trying to write like an AI), and IMO getting people to recognize that we actually do have a decent solution in this space now is pretty important if we want the Internet to remain a place for humans and not just bot swarms.

> rule of three, em dashes, etc

You appear to be misinformed about how Pangram specifically works, it is not based on pattern detection of that sort. I recommend reading their whitepaper, it's a pretty understandable explanation of exactly how they trained their classifier.

> and haven't looked back

I did the same but I'm aware that LinkedIn is probably how people got in touch with me in the past, eventually leading to a job. So I'm waiting before not having looked back until the next time I need a job :) Regardless, it's not the world I want to live in anymore so you just gotta disconnect.

Oh yeah I can't wait for the next election. Things get so toxic when money/power is involved.

money/power will not be involved in the next election? Not sure if I completely follow your comment.

LinkedIn is basically unusable at this point. I actually did used to use it a fair amount before but I've since deleted it and just use email notifications to see any notifications from recruiters.

These are the rubes who buy into the desperate messaging that AI is "inevitable". It doesn't occur to them that their behavior is absurd and empty because they think it's what everyone else is doing too. Why question a decision you see as outside the boundary of your free will?

It's like a burgoo [1]. A steaming cauldron of community slop.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgoo

Hey, at least a bowl of burgoo tastes good, unlike some community slops.

the enslopification is pretty obnoxious.

Really no different than the content that is usually on LinkedIn. It's been a worthless dumpster fire for ten years at least.

This isn't just a spam problem, it's a technology making mediocre content economically viable at unprecedented scale. /s

> If you're a job seeker, most of the jobs are fake for pretend growth optics.

Maybe, but it continues to be one of the best places to find work.

In my view, LinkedIn has never really been a place for serious discussion.

If I can't tell the difference, why would it matter?

The problem is when I can eventually tell the difference.

I can't tell if your comment is LLM generated or not. What's the point of even reading comments anymore I should just ask claude what it thinks.

I'm real xutopia. I'm real.

I might be a dog for all you know (though I neither confirm nor deny this), but I assure you I'm real.

> and haven't looked back

money/power will not be involved in the next election? Not sure if I completely follow your comment.

Hey, at least a bowl of burgoo tastes good, unlike some community slops.

Same here, I hate it. Instead of just reading I find myself also dedicating brain power trying to decide if it's worth reading or not based on the first few sentences... if someone can't put in the effort to actually write something themselves I absolutely do not want to put in the effort to read it.

Where is? I've gotten about 2 interviews via Linkedin, wellfound has little which are the two I know most, Indeed is more useless than even LinkedIn.

I used to have decent luck with Who is hiring threads but not recently as there's relatively little for mid level engineers.

The job market is completely out of whack

It's bleak out there, on the internet.

Good riddance. Reviews are just other people telling you how to live your life. Beyond it being subjective to the reviewer, there's really no upside in engaging with reviews. If it's a bad review, now you feel bad about having wanted to engage with something with abysmal scores (think: liking a movie then finding out it has a 32% on rotten tomatoes), or if it's a good review, it's useless because you were already going to engage with the thing being reviewed. You chose the restaurant for a reason, right? It sounded good.

We should get back to having our own experiences regardless of what the consensus says. If it looks good _to you_, it might just be good _for you_.

The job market is completely out of whack

I caught myself saying "push back" the other day. I've never said it before, it's a Claude-ism.

Twitter and Reddit were already on their way to being terrible, but the automation of the worst of what those places were becoming is now available to everyone.

We should get back to having our own experiences regardless of what the consensus says. If it looks good _to you_, it might just be good _for you_.

It amusing that Musk attempted to reverse his purchase of Twitter by citing the number of bots, and then research like this comes out alleging that now 29% of the X's long form articles are fully AI.

It's not exactly the same thing, of course, but still interesting the extent to which this type of content is viewed as the business opportunity for him.

LinkedIn has become an AI-slopped wasteland. It’s like the opposite of when boomers found Facebook, which was the weirdest melting pot of zero-integrity posts and comments.

Now we have these tech-savvy people generating worthless images and producing generic, emoji-infested takeaways.

I read through LinkedIn posts and it's AI slop all the way down, it's horrendous. Every post is either written entirely by AI or mostly written by AI.

> rule of three, em dashes, etc

I just tried it, created an account, and wrote a few sentences about how my day went. These sentences got classified as AI assisted, so clearly their classifier doesn't work that well.

> Pangram does work

It's trivial to see how many people think Pangram is absolute trash[1] (because it is).

> You appear to be misinformed about how Pangram specifically works, it is not based on pattern detection of that sort. I recommend reading their whitepaper, it's a pretty understandable explanation of exactly how they trained their classifier.

I did read their paper (which is, by the way, very scant on details), and they trained their classifier in the laziest way possible: here's a chunk of "human-written" text and here's a chunk of "AI-written" text, put them in the right bucket, and do this a zillion times. Literally zero sophistication. Also: what do you think "pattern recognition" is, if not a "classifier"?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/1rm11rs/pangram_c...

I just tried it, created an account, and wrote a few sentences about how my day went. These sentences got classified as AI assisted, so clearly their classifier doesn't work that well.

> Pangram does work

It's trivial to see how many people think Pangram is absolute trash[1] (because it is).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/1rm11rs/pangram_c...

Two months ago, we launched our Chrome extension to help combat the rising slop problem on social media. It lets users scan posts on social media as they scroll, flagging AI-generated content so they can make informed decisions about how they spend their attention.

Pangram is a research-first company, not just for our industry-leading AI detection algorithms, but for tracking the risk and prevalence of AI-generated content. Social media is one of the hardest domains to study here — much harder than, say, news articles, research papers, or Amazon reviews. But it's also one of the most crucial, because it's potentially the highest-volume source of AI-generated content we face.

We believe it's important to understand this problem so that we can better combat it. That's why we included an opt-in setting in our Chrome extension, to allow users to aid our research by anonymously sharing their scan statistics with us. We've compiled the first few months of this data into the report below.

Key findings:

One in four longform posts on social media flagged as fully AI-generated
Of all posts we flagged as AI-generated, two-thirds came from LinkedIn
Nearly half of X/Twitter articles contained AI writing

AI-generated content is hitting longform the hardest

AI-generated content appeared across all social media platforms in our data set. The average AI rate across all scanned items was 13.8%, but specific rates varied by platform and item length. On four out of five platforms, longer content was more likely to be AI-generated than shortform content. Across all platforms, one in four longform items (25.72% of items over 250 words) were fully AI-generated.

Substack was an exception; there, the rate of fully AI-generated content remained fairly flat, and longer, more substantial posts were actually slightly less likely to be AI-generated compared to shorter ones.

LinkedIn was the most AI-saturated platform, where more than 40% of longform posts flagged as fully AI-generated. However, if we included mixed AI and human content, X/Twitter was the worst off: almost half of X articles were either fully AI-generated (23.9%) or AI-assisted/mixed (22.9%), with only 53.2% of X articles flagging as fully human-authored.

Our data shows that AI-generated content is a problem across all platforms, and it is hitting longform content especially hard. Even Substack, which was the longform platform with the lowest combined AI rate, still saw more than a fifth of its posts (21.9%) flag as AI-generated or AI-assisted. This is consistent with the rise of AI-generated content we're seeing in writing elsewhere, such as in newspaper opinion pieces.

AI slop is flooding LinkedIn

LinkedIn had the highest AI share of any platform across the board. LinkedIn posts made up a third of scanned items, yet it accounted for nearly two-thirds (62%) of all AI content we flagged. Contrary to what one might expect, people are overwhelmingly willing to use AI to speak on their behalf in professional settings that are associated with their real identity, and less likely to use it on casual and anonymous platforms.

LinkedIn also encourages AI use on its platform in several ways, including a built-in "Write with AI" button (now rebranded "Enhance post," but still offering AI writing assistance). People are noticing LinkedIn's growing reputation for slop – perhaps to combat it, an executive at LinkedIn recently announced that the platform would be detecting and downranking AI-generated posts using an in-house algorithm; ironically, the announcement was itself AI-generated. Whether or not the company is attempting to modulate AI in their feed, our users are still seeing a lot of AI writing on LinkedIn.

In our data, Reddit had the highest scan volume of any platform, making up 36.7% of items that we scanned. Yet at just 4.4%, Reddit had one of the lowest combined AI shares of any platform. This is due to a composition effect: replies on Reddit were overwhelmingly human-authored (98.1%) and replies altogether made up 72% of Reddit items that we scanned. Top-level posts on Reddit were much more likely to be AI-written, at 11.6% of posts, in line with X/Twitter's 10.0% AI-saturation. The same pattern held on LinkedIn, albeit to a lesser extent: a top-level LinkedIn post was 1.35x more likely to be AI-generated than a comment.

Although LinkedIn replies were less likely to be AI-generated than posts, the effect reverses when controlling for length: LinkedIn comments were actually slightly more likely to be AI compared to top-level posts. For Reddit, the difference in AI rate was independent of post format – when controlling for length, top-level Reddit posts still had a 5.25x greater chance of being AI-generated.

Reddit's AI-free replies point to a blind spot of many anti-botting strategies. While Reddit's spam policy effectively eliminates accounts that use AI to automatically generate spam replies, this approach only catches the lowest-effort spam content on the platform. Top-level Reddit posts only make up a quarter of all Reddit items, but they have far more audience impact, and their lower volume allows AI-authored posts to slip past volume-based moderation like rate-limiting.

Method and data collection

Collectively, since the Chrome Extension's launch on April 24th 2026, users who opted into sharing their data for research helped us create a dataset of 1,002,627 posts across several of the largest social media platforms on the internet: LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, X/Twitter, and Reddit. Each post in our dataset is counted only once, and we only scan items that are longer than 50 words. Every post was analyzed with Pangram 3.3, our latest AI detection model, which achieves a 0.01% false positive rate. This dataset allows us a direct window into what AI-generated content people are seeing on their feeds at this point in time.

Conclusion

AI writing is now a problem everywhere on social media. This is concerning, but it's in line with what we're seeing elsewhere online: researchers estimated that 35% of newly published websites on the open internet were AI-generated or AI-assisted. An internet that is completely flooded with undisclosed AI content is bleak, but we don't believe it's inevitable. We hope that by providing transparency to AI-generated content online, we can give internet users back some control of how they spend their attention.

Hacker Times