LinkedIn’s Calling For A Stop To Slop

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If your LinkedIn feed has started feeling like it was written by the world’s most annoyingly, aggressively enthusiastic corporate intern, you’re not imagining it.

“Here are 5 lessons I learned about leadership while waiting 45 minutes for a coffee.” 🙄

Barf.

LinkedIn has also, apparently, had enough. 

The platform is cracking down on AI slop (and encouraging others to, too), particularly the kind that gets churned out at scale without much original thought behind it.

It’s worth noting that AI-assisted content isn’t the problem. 

Feel free to use AI as a helper – to research, organize, edit, or package your (original!!!!) thoughts. 

And while you may be panicking, thinking “how do I make sure LinkedIn doesn’t think my post is AI?!”, there's another important thing to consider:

What does all of this mean for thought leadership?

AI didn’t invent the generic grey sludge; it just made it dramatically easier to produce. 

The “five lessons I learned” and “it’s not X, it’s Y” posts were here long before ChatGPT was.

So if everyone’s producing content at scale now, is “more people saw it” really a useful definition of success anymore? 🤔

It may be time to start thinking more about what actually makes anyone stop, care, and remember you.

For a long time, the scoreboard has been pretty simple: impressions, engagement, followers, views. More numbers = more success.

But when everyone can manufacture another post in five minutes, attention starts getting a lot cheaper. A post can rack up 50,000 impressions and still be completely forgettable. Meanwhile, 2,000 impressions from the right people could totally lead somewhere.

The goal is getting the right people to remember you, DM you, reference you, invite you to speak, or just to make them think, Huh. I hadn't thought about it that way.

How much credibility, relevance, and genuine interest are you creating per impression? How much trust are you building?

Reach isn’t everything, babe. It’s time to start trust-maxxing.

The answer isn’t necessarily to use less AI, but to make sure it’s not doing the thinking for you. It’s an intern, not an experienced employee. Or even entry-level, for that matter. So don’t treat it like one!

Bring the receipts 🧾

“Customers are increasingly looking for personalized experiences” could have been written by approximately every marketer, comms professional, influencer, journalist…you get the idea.

Tell us what your customers actually said. 

Tell us what surprised you.

Talk about what went wrong. 

AI can generate the lesson, but it can’t give you the story behind it; the part people are gonna trauma bond with you over.

Go ten toes down on your opinion.

“The future of work is changing”.

Uhhhh. Duh.

Not really a unique thought. More like a weather report.

Remember, people, it 👏 has 👏 to 👏 feel 👏 personal. 

Not “add a selfie and three exclamation points” personal. 

Give us the thing that actually happened to you.

You need the specifics for a genuine, authentic human connection.

Ya know, like when reality shows weren’t just casting influencers. 🥲

AI can be a great sidekick to research, organize your very adult-onset-ADHD pile of half-formed thoughts, find the throughline between seven ideas you dumped into a Google Doc at 1:14 a.m., poke holes in your argument, or turn one strong idea into five formats.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking AI, “I have approximately 14 thoughts, and none of them are currently in the correct order. Help.”

The problem is when AI is responsible for the thought itself.

AND YOU’RE BETTER THAN SLOP.

What do you know that other people don’t? 

What have you learned that someone else could use? 

What do you believe that isn’t the same thing everyone else is saying? 

What can you prove?

That’s the stuff worth putting your name on.

The goal isn’t no AI. It’s no outsourced thinking. Let AI package it up all pretty. Just make sure the OG came from a non-robot entity.

AI made content cheap. That means original expertise is more valuable, not less.

Ash & Lizzy

Who's going where and why it matters. Not just job shifts - power dynamics, layoffs, and who's headed out.

💔 Forbes has cut “a small percentage” of its staff due to revenue shortfalls.

🎉 Tech journos Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are bringing their new video-first show, Machine Gods, to NPR.

👀 VC Insider, Business Insider’s first subscriber-only newsletter, is available to preview.

🧳 Brendan Bordelon is now a Senior Tech Editor and co-author of the new Decoded newsletter and podcast at Politico.

🎉 Morgan Chittum is the new Senior Finance Reporter at Fortune.

🎉 Alex Eichenstein has joined The Information to cover finance.

🎉 Ray Fernandez has joined Inc. Magazine to write about technology.

✌🏼Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai has left TechCrunch and is focusing on finishing his book about the history of government spyware.

🧳 Megan Morrone has joined the team at CNBC to edit tech coverage from the San Francisco bureau.

🎉 Claire Rychlewski is the new Deputy Managing Editor, Axios Pro, at Axios.

🧳 Charlie Wells is now covering fintech at Bloomberg News.

🤖 Maxwell Zeff has joined The Wall Street Journal to cover AI.

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