LinkedIn announced that it will demote posts showing what VP of Product Laura Lorenzetti called the hallmarks of AI-generated drivel. Engagement bait, recycled thought leadership, and my personal favorite: contrastive construction. (The “it’s not X, it’s Y” tell). I banned that from my own writing two years ago for exactly this reason. LinkedIn is right to want to remove AI slop from the platform, but AI slop is in the eye of the beholder. Even if you could properly identify it, the process of removing it would resemble a neverending game of Whac-A-Mole.
Detecting “contrastive construction” as a signal of AI writing is a great example of why pattern-based detection fails. LLMs picked that pattern up from human writers who used it for decades before ChatGPT existed. Now that LinkedIn has announced the signal, the slop generators will stop using it. The arms race continues, one tell at a time. We lived through “em dash discourse” already. Contrastive construction is next. There will be many others.
Where do we draw the line between AI slop, AI assisted slop, and plain bad writing? A reader who writes a first draft in their own words and uses AI to tighten it has produced something more readable than they could have on their own; LinkedIn says that is welcome. The detection model has no way to tell that user from a bot that scraped a competitor’s post and ran it through a paraphraser. Both look identical from the outside.
There is a harder question. What happens when AI is a better writer than the person using it? A significant percentage of LinkedIn professionals have useful judgment and weak prose. AI assistance helps them communicate better than they could on their own. The fix removes the thinkers and the bots.
LinkedIn’s heart is in the right place, as its news feed is all but unreadable. The structural fix is to reward original thinking and surface expertise. Pattern detection is a treadmill.
Every company needs a Claw strategy. Do you have one?
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.