LinkedIn's AI Slop Button is the worst feature in years (here's why)

Last week LinkedIn added a button that lets anyone flag your post as "AI slop." Everyone assumed I'd be cheering. I'm not, and not for the reason you'd think.

Here's what people get wrong about me. I run an AI-native consulting business. AI sits at the heart of almost everything I do. So you'd expect me to be defending it here. I'm not defending AI. I'm defending something more important, and LinkedIn just blurred the line between the two.

Policing slop was never yours to hand out

Let me say the unpopular thing first.

Deciding what is good and what is slop is LinkedIn's job. That is the entire point of an algorithm. Show more of the good stuff, less of the bad, let quality rise. If the feed is full of garbage, that is a ranking problem, and ranking is what they are paid to solve.

Instead they handed the job to us.

On paper, crowdsourcing sounds fair. Let the people decide. But look at what you are actually holding. A button that quietly kills someone's reach, on a platform where everyone is already fighting over a scrap of real estate. You have just handed every competitor, every troll, every person having a bad day a loaded gun. They will not press it because a post is slop. They will press it because it is yours.

And they aimed at the wrong target completely.

Walk through your own comments. Mine are 90% bots. VAs talking to VAs. Language models talking to language models. That is the real cesspool, and there is no button for it. They built a tool to police the writing and left the comment section on fire.

I don't read to find out if a human wrote it

I don't read writing to know a human made it. I read for the quality of the ideas. That is the only thing that has ever mattered.

So the phrase "AI slop" bothers me, because it smuggles in a lie. It suggests the problem is the AI. It isn't. Slop is slop whether a human typed it or a machine did. We have all read human slop. Faultless, grammatically perfect, completely empty. You could lift any line out of it and it would sit happily in ten thousand other posts. That is not an AI problem. That is a thinking problem.

And it cuts the other way. Why would we punish someone for using AI to get a good idea across? The non-native speaker who finally sounds as sharp as they think. The person who can't afford a ghostwriter. Since when did access become the crime?

Even LinkedIn's own product chief, Hari Srinivasan, admitted it: "AI and slop are not the same thing. Many people refine thoughts with AI." He's right. So why ship a button that treats them as the same?

What AI-native actually looks like

Here is the distinction the whole debate keeps missing.

AI slop is content the machine wrote for you. You find a post you like, paste it in, type "repurpose this for me," and ship whatever falls out. It adds nothing. You have poured another cup into an ocean of average.

AI-native is the opposite. It starts with your idea. Or the AI pulls the idea out of you by interviewing you, dragging your lived experience onto the page. You build it together. Then you add the last 30% of finesse that makes it unmistakably yours.

Same tool. Completely different output. And the difference is entirely you.

I know because I live it. AI co-writes nearly everything I publish. It drives a brain I keep on GitHub that holds every client result, every lead, every conversation in my business, updated every time I talk to it. It reads the top posts on X and LinkedIn and tells me what is actually working, the job I used to pay a software tool to do. It resurfaces the formats I have already won with. But it never writes in a vacuum. It interviews me first. It gets my scars, my numbers, my point of view. Then I finesse the last stretch.

The tell? I can't see a performance difference between the posts I wrote by hand and the ones I wrote with AI. Not one. As long as the idea underneath is good, the reader never cares, and neither do I.

Which means the real unlock was never the AI. It is the quality of your answers when it interviews you. Give it lazy answers, you get slop. Give it your real, hard-won thinking, you get something only you could have made. Slop is on the human. It always was.

Who gets the bacon

Zoom out and this is really a fight about what stays human.

I get the unease. There is a real pull back toward imperfection and the quality of the written word, and one risk worth naming out loud. Thinking is writing and writing is thinking. Feed every original thought into a model and stop doing the reps, and something drains away. That is fair.

But here is the other side. AI is the biggest edge any of us have been handed since the wheel. So picture the two people this button creates.

One sits there angry, coping, hammering the slop button, publishing one poorly written post a day, barely growing.

The other uses it properly. Ten times the output. A hundred times the reach. Quality still sitting around 90%. Showing up everywhere with ideas that are genuinely theirs.

Who do you think wins?

Here is my own receipt. Last month was the best engagement month of my life. I reached 150,000 people. I launched my consulting arm and collected $38,500 net in a single month, at 90% margins, with a team of two. Nearly all of that content was written with AI.

Is any of it slop? You tell me. My inbox has never been fuller.

Use it, but use it right

LinkedIn came from the right place. They just forgot the world is not black and white.

Because this matters far beyond one button. What actually changes with AI is how we capture and deliver our expertise. Your value does not drop because a machine helped you write it down. Your value is the lived experience that is unique to every client you have ever served. Capture that, tap into it, share it at scale, and you win. That bank of proprietary experience is the only moat left.

So no, I am not cheering for the slop button. But I am not scared of it either.

It was never AI slop. It was only ever humans that make slop.

Use AI. Just use it right.

Be great,

Luke Shalom