If you haven’t noticed yet, LinkedIn has a new button and it is worth pausing on what it says. Not “report spam” or “report abuse”, but “seems like AI slop” — a one-click way for users to flag the low-effort, machine-generated content that has been burying the feeds we really want to see.
It is not alone. YouTube has removed 130,000 low-effort AI channels this year, Snapchat has reversed a decision to promote AI content in its feed and Substack has built AI detection directly into its platform. The study behind that move found that more than 40% of long-form LinkedIn content is now AI-generated. On Substack itself the figure is 10%.
Those are quite some figures. On the platform where most business content lives, nearly half of what you scroll past was never touched by a human mind. And the platforms, finally, have started to care.
Slop — and what it costs
A quick definition, because the word is doing a lot of work lately. Slop is not “anything made with AI”, it is content produced at scale, with no original thought and no one taking responsibility for it — the synthetic presenter reading a script nobody wrote, the 800-word post that says nothing in a confident voice, the channel churning out videos that exist only to catch search traffic.
Because machines have made content nearly free to produce, so production has exploded. Attention, meanwhile, has stayed exactly as scarce as it always was. Something had to give and what gave was trust: readers who have been burned a few times stop believing any of it.
And that is why the platforms are acting, not out of some newfound love of the written word. Their product is attention and slop destroys it. When users learn that most of what they are shown is filler, they leave. The crackdown is self-preservation for the platforms — although how long it will work for as the models continue to improve is anybody’s guess right now.
If your business publishes anything, you should already be prioritising authenticity. But now it’s more important than ever to hold true because the platforms have both the motive and the means to down-rank generic machine output and to reward content that is demonstrably human. Obvious human voice and genuine provenance are quietly becoming ranking assets, which is of course how it should always have been.
For anyone who trades on expertise this is excellent news, as long as they are capable of getting their point across in an engaging and readable way. Competent and generic will no longer be enough, because competent and generic is exactly what the machines produce for free.
What it means for your content
A few practical thoughts.
First, say things worth saying. Original takes, real stories and opinions you are willing to defend are the things slop cannot imitate, because imitation is all it can do. If your content could have been published by any firm in your sector, it is indistinguishable from the machine output it is competing with.
Second, be visibly you. Write like a person, attach your name and take positions. “Seems like AI slop” is a judgement users make in seconds and it is made on voice more than on anything else.
Third, provenance is your friend. Platforms that are penalising the anonymous flood will reward sources they can verify as real people with real track records. That is an asset that takes time to build and cannot be faked at scale.
None of this means stepping back from AI — we use it every day at Be Bold for research, for angles and for the heavy lifting that sits underneath good thinking. But the judgement, the voice and the accountability have to be human. That was always true, though the difference now is that the platforms are enforcing it.
The concern those of us who write for a living have is that we can be misinterpreted as AI, because the AI learned from what we collectively wrote over many years! It took the best examples of well-received content and averaged them. That’s what the LLMs do; they’re machines guessing at the next most likely token, which is always going to be based on the average.
So we need to be particularly on point regarding the angles we pick, the humanity we build into our work and the flair that truly engages readers.
Let’s face it, anything valuable should never be easy — and it should always stand out from the ‘slop’.