{"id":837791,"date":"2026-07-31T08:37:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T08:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/837791\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T08:37:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T08:37:11","slug":"microsoft-lets-users-report-slop-after-spending-41-billion-on-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/837791\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Lets Users Report Slop After Spending $41 Billion On AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals. It used to be quite boring, but now people have found it\u2019s a great place to try to earn business brain clout by going there and dumping AI slop. Microsoft, which purchased LinkedIn in 2016<\/a>, has decided to acknowledge the scourge of the \u201cWhat losing my childhood Golden Retriever to pancreatic cancer taught me about B2B sales\u201d-style chum on the platform with a new button that flags it as AI slop.<\/p>\n

Instead of just reporting your ex-boss\u2019s posts as spam, you can now tag them with \u201cseems like AI slop.\u201d The move comes after AI detector startup Pangram recently claimed<\/a> that over 40 percent of long-form posts on LinkedIn are AI garbage. Pangram has its own problems, but the publicity forced Microsoft to reckon with something anyone who has come within three clicks of LinkedIn has known for months.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI slop is a top priority for all of us,\u201d chief product officer Hari Srinivasan says in a post<\/a> (via The Verge<\/a>). \u201cWe really care about this.\u201d In a post definitely not written with the help of AI, he continued, \u201cWe are ramping the ability for members to tell us if they believe a post or comment seems like AI slop. Slop is hard to define and the definition changes; this lets us tune our models and make better feeds.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the ironies of this whole thing is that LinkedIn had built in an \u201cenhance your post\u201d feature to achieve exactly this outcome of slop-ifying the platform. It\u2019s now walking that back. Just \u201cproofreads\u201d now. \u201cWe asked ourselves why do people post with AI anyway?\u201d Srinivasan wrote. \u201cThe answer is LinkedIn isn\u2019t a one-word kind of place and they feel more confident running their posts through AI. We\u2019re taking this learning, removing the \u2018enhance your post\u2019 feature you see when you write a post or message & replacing with a feature that proofreads your words, but does not change your voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Attempts to de-slopify LinkedIn come right as Microsoft reported $35.8 billion in profit<\/a> for the quarter after spending $41 billion on capital investments, including building out its data center infrastructure to service the AI revolution everyone swears will improve our lives any day now. What does Microsoft<\/a> think the AI is being used for? Surely not a bubble that\u2019s making its gaming hardware unaffordable and the broader internet unreadable in the meantime.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our \u2018theory of the mind\u2019 that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other,\u201d CEO Satya Nadella wrote back in January<\/a>. \u201cThis is the product design question we need to debate and answer.\u201d Unfortunately he didn\u2019t post it on LinkedIn so there\u2019s no \u201cseems like AI slop\u201d button to press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals. It used to be quite boring, but now people have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":837792,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,7476,63,61],"class_list":["post-837791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-linkedin","tag-microsoft","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}