LinkedIn was created as the place where professionals demonstrated what they genuinely knew how to do. A room where ideas met careers and authority found its foundation in shared experience.
Who remains in that room today?
It increasingly resembles a hall of mirrors, where everyone reflects but nobody illuminates.
The feed scrolls through identical phrases, orderly lists, and empty compliments. Despite containing an enormous body of knowledge and positions, it feels as though we are always reading the same post and the same story, even when we cannot remember where we saw it before.
The reason is simple. LinkedIn now feels the same everywhere because, even though many profiles are communicating, only one voice emerges: the voice of AI.
Most posts are written with the same tools, beginning from similar prompts and optimized for the same algorithm.
Online, it is called AI slop: low-effort content generated by artificial intelligence that appears polished on the surface but lacks perspective and substance.
LinkedIn has become its reference platform, with enormous reputational consequences.
The announcement
Laura Lorenzetti, LinkedIn’s Vice President of Product, published an official article in which the platform declared war on three specific categories of material: AI posts and comments without original perspective, videos created to collect engagement without adding value, and third-party automation tools that generate contributions at scale.
The platform will also penalize bots and false profiles, while allowing users to filter verified members, now more than one hundred million, in profile views and comments.
Posts identified as AI slop will not be removed. They will be suppressed from recommendations and remain visible principally to direct contacts, with limited reach.
People who have built their LinkedIn output around generic AI contributions will therefore be penalized sharply. In initial tests, detection systems identified 94% of content considered generic, according to The Next Web.
The paradox
There is an obvious paradox. LinkedIn itself promotes AI through the “Rewrite with AI” button integrated into the post composer.
The same platform declaring war on AI slop sells AI tools for producing posts. Is that hypocrisy? Not exactly.
The distinction lies in the content. AI that clarifies an original idea is welcome. AI that substitutes the human ability to formulate an idea will be suppressed.
Among the signals detection systems already examine are constructions Bliss has highlighted repeatedly, including compulsive use of the long dash and the contrast formula “it is not X, it is Y”.
Anyone who has followed this blog will recognize both patterns.
Why so much AI?
LinkedIn originally served the sharing of expertise and the construction of human professional relationships. The massive use of AI today has three specific causes.
The first is technological. AI reduced the cost of producing a post to almost zero. Writing something presentable once required time, effort and revision. It now requires a prompt and thirty seconds, perhaps followed by a quick reread. The activation barrier disappeared, and with it the natural selection that the barrier provided.
The second reason is algorithmic. For years, LinkedIn rewarded frequency. People who published and interacted often grew. Those who did so rarely disappeared. The implicit message was that volume was the strategy. AI made it possible to take volume to previously impossible levels, and many users did exactly that.
The third and final reason is psychological, and perhaps the most interesting. LinkedIn is the platform on which the need for professional validation is more explicit than on any other social network. Research into the dopaminergic reinforcement of likes shows that approval notifications activate reward circuits involved in other compulsive behaviours.
On LinkedIn, those circuits operate on professional ground, making dependency easier to rationalize. We write “networking”, but often mean “searching for a like”.
AI simply transformed this dynamic into an industrial system.
What happens if AI spreads elsewhere?
The bad news is that it is already too late. Other social networks already contain enormous amounts of AI. It may be less obvious because the content uses different formats, but it is there.
LinkedIn’s move is the first of this kind by a professional platform, which makes it useful to ask what would happen if Instagram, TikTok or X adopted the same logic.
On Instagram, the problem is already visible in images: generated faces filling lifestyle feeds, photorealistic landscapes that do not exist and visual campaigns created entirely with Midjourney. A crackdown on AI images would require mandatory watermarking, which Google is already standardizing through SynthID. Visibility could be redistributed towards those who produce authentic material.
On TikTok, where production speed is already extreme, penalizing AI slop could restore the format the platform originally rewarded: a real person, in real time, with a personal perspective. Paradoxically, it could save short-form video from collapsing into homogeneity.
On X, the problem is different. AI bots are already part of the infrastructure. Removing them would radically change the perception of discussion on the platform and reveal that many popular trends and conversations are artificial constructions. Resistance would be strong because perceived volume is part of the product.
In every case, the emerging direction is the same. Platforms are realizing that signal quality is worth more than the volume of general noise. A feed in which people find something valuable has greater economic value than a feed in which they see a great deal but find nothing.
The damage to personal branding
Ironically, AI slop is produced to strengthen personal branding, while also being an extremely negative signal for anyone trying to build a profile.
The pillars of a strong personal brand are a recognizable voice, a defensible point of view, and solid consistency.
Delegating posts to AI can refine and structure the voice, but everything else must remain human. Perspective and consistency are individual characteristics. When perspective itself is requested from AI, the result is uniformity.
The reputational damage develops in three ways.
The first is the loss of a distinctive voice. After months of AI-generated posts, the profile sounds like every other profile. That is the opposite of personal branding. It is general branding.
The second is the inability to sustain a real conversation. Someone who delegated the thinking cannot answer a direct question on the subject with the same quality displayed in the post, or produces comments and interactions that fall far below the apparent standard. The damage is serious.
The third is the erosion of trust. Over time, audiences perceive the difference between people who write because they have something to say and those who write because they want to appear as though they do. Trust gradually disappears.
Authority is not something to optimize. It is something to build.
Building requires time. AI can help us use that time better, but it cannot fill it for us.
An assessment for brands
The argument applies even more strongly to organizations that treat LinkedIn presence as a delegated content channel.
Many companies built thought-leadership strategies by assigning post production to AI tools or agencies that manufacture content in series. The result is a presence that looks active but says nothing about the brand. A company profile that publishes every day without ever taking a position, or without sharing anything a competitor could not sign in the same way, produces the opposite of the reputation it was seeking.
AI is not the problem
AI itself is not the real problem.
Despite everything discussed so far, the tool will never be the central issue. Its use will be.
LinkedIn has declared war on AI slop. The real war should not be against ChatGPT or Claude, but against the habit of using them in order not to think.
AI can help us write better, organize ideas, and find angles we had not considered. I use it every day. The important thing is that it does not replace what makes a contribution genuinely relevant: experience and the point of view that makes a piece of news or an opinion unique and worthy of a position.
LinkedIn’s hall of mirrors is full of well-constructed sentences. But what exists beyond the reflection?
I do not know. I am certain of one thing: here, as everywhere in our country, value exists. And it is human.
The challenge is to cultivate it without shortcuts.
New Connections (FAQ)
How can I tell whether a post was written with AI?
LinkedIn is using an approach it calls “AI solving AI”: systems trained to recognize recurring patterns in generated posts that lack an original perspective. Signals include linguistic constructions typical of generative models, the contrast structure “it is not X, it is Y”, compulsive use of the long dash and repeated formats without variation. Posts identified in this way are not removed, but suppressed from recommendations. The penalty concerns distribution to new audiences, rather than visibility among direct contacts.
Will using artificial intelligence to write posts penalize me?
LinkedIn is explicit: assisted AI is welcome when the post begins with an original idea and adds a real perspective. The penalty targets generic posts that could have been signed by anyone and restate familiar concepts without contributing anything. The criterion is not the tool. It is the quality of the thinking that precedes it. People who use AI to express their own ideas more effectively have nothing to fear. People who use it to avoid thinking do.
How can I tell whether I am performing well on LinkedIn?
Stop measuring LinkedIn presence in volume and begin measuring it in positioning. One post a month containing a specific, defensible, and recognizable perspective is worth more than thirty generic posts that say nothing specific about the brand. The change is editorial rather than technical. Someone inside the company must take responsibility for having a point of view, building it over time, and publishing it even when not everyone agrees.
BLISS®
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