498. "Seems like AI slop"

John Espirian: 00:00:00

Would you use a new LinkedIn feature that lets you mark posts as AI slop? We're going to take a look today. It's episode 498 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone. I'm John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, a weekly independent show all about LinkedIn best practice. Fans of the show will have noticed that I have skipped a couple of weeks as I've been taking a bit of time off, but I'm back with an interesting new topic about a new LinkedIn feature.

But before we get to that, we're going to take a look at listener questions in the Postbag section.

So, for those new to the show, we have a regular section at the start of the show where I will take questions from listeners to the show and I prefer those questions or feedback or other comments to come in via voice note format if possible. And we've got two voice notes this week and they're both actually on the same sort of topics. I'll play them both in order.

The first one is via Mark Lee and the second one via Jeremy Freeman. Let's listen to the gents right now.

Mark Lee: 00:01:15

Hi, John. Another great episode. Thanks for that.

My question relates to you and other experts sometimes reference specific LinkedIn guidance help, release information, official stuff, and I'm just never sure where to go in order to get what I'm going to find of interest in that regard. Are there specific pages that you could suggest we bookmark if we want that information?

I think it might be helpful and of interest to others, too. Many thanks and please keep up the good work.

Jeremy Freeman: 00:01:46

Hi John. LinkedIn have made so many changes lately, but it's hard to keep up. Did they publish a change log of recent updates or even a roadmap of what's coming?

I don't think I've ever seen one, but do you think that is something they should develop?

John Espirian: 00:02:04

OK, so thank you to Mark and Jeremy for asking those questions about LinkedIn information and change logs and stuff like that. Well, I've got a few resources for this.

First of all, I follow all of LinkedIn's official blogs, so there's at least 4 that I can think of off the top of my head and I've got those bookmarked. I think the best place to share these in detail will be in the show notes that accompany this show. So, I'll put those out for you so you can click along and follow through as well.

There's also LinkedIn's Pressroom page which includes their world map, so you can see how many members they say they have, how many employees they've got, how many languages they support, how many posts are made per minute, other kind of stats that you sometimes see quoted out and about. So, the Pressroom page is good for an official source on that sort of thing.

I also follow plenty of LinkedIn employees. This is just about the only time when I use the bell feature where if you follow someone and you click the bell, then you will get notifications each time that person posts. I tend not to do that about "normal" people, but if it's someone high up in LinkedIn who's sharing interesting product information.

So, for example, the new CEO Dan Shapero has been quite vocal since he came into the post. He's does video posts sharing updates about LinkedIn. That's the kind of stuff I want to see in my feed, but I can't always guarantee it'll be there. So, I'll go and follow the person, hit the bell and then see what they're saying.

LinkedIn has a very large help section, so I keep a close eye on that to look for new articles that are posted there. Usually something that's new or has been recently updated tells me that there's something interesting to check out. It might be a feature I don't care about at all.

You know, it might be to do with the LinkedIn Recruiter package, for example, but sometimes it's to do with a feature change. That's another good way of staying abreast of changes.

I also look at third-party sources, so websites such as TechCrunch and Social Media Today and others. And again, I'll include links to these resources in the show notes so you can check it out.

I suppose the most valuable thing I do is just to keep in touch with other LinkedIn specialists. And I've got loads of them, thankfully, in my Espresso+ community. And we all, we kind of muck in and share what we know with each other.

So, it's rare that for example, a new feature will launch and other LinkedIn specialists won't very quickly hear about it because as soon as something happens, we tend to share that news with each other. So, that's probably my number one source.

And then when it comes to things like logging features, I mean, I do a little bit of this in my posts and on my blog, on my website too.

But a couple of good sources I can think of to two members of the Espresso+ community actually, Kevin D. Turner in the US and Lynnaire Johnston in New Zealand. They produce really good content to take a look at. I suspect, Mark and Jeremy, you both know those people pretty well.

There's nothing really like a public roadmap, which is what Jeremy was asking about. Sometimes you get hints at things coming, and occasionally something pops up in a help page and then disappears a few days later.

So, we've kind of got breadcrumbs. It's clues that we work with, but there's no big map that is publicly available of what's coming down the pipe.

I wish it were, because that would certainly make training a lot easier if, you know, you spend a couple of hours training a team on how LinkedIn works at the moment without realising that feature is going to be pulled next week. It would be really good to have such a roadmap, but one doesn't exist.

So, yes, so those are a few different avenues from which you can get your LinkedIn information.

Of course, you can also listen to podcasts like this one if you want to just stay abreast of what's happening right now. We go into a lot more detail inside the private community that we run in Espresso+, if you really want to be right on the pulse. But certainly mine's not the only public LinkedIn podcast. There's plenty of others. And again, I'll put some links in the show notes for you to check out and hopefully help you stay Informed with what's happening on LinkedIn right now.

OK, that's the Postbag done for this week, and as usual I always invite listeners to pop in with any questions you might have. I prefer voice notes, but if you'd rather type something out via an email or via a direct message, that's totally fine. Drop me a line any time. It's free to message me on LinkedIn, even if we're not connected with your burning question, and if I think it's of interest to other listeners, then I'll include it in next week's Postbag.

OK, let's move on to the main topic that I wanted to mention. It's a brand new thing that's just come in the last couple of days as I'm recording this, a feature that pops up when you are browsing your LinkedIn feed.

So, you're scrolling through posts and you'll notice that every post has a little 3-dot menu in the top-right corner where you can take various actions relating to the post, like saving it or copying the link. One of those options now is titled "Seems like AI slop".

So, there's a new button and if you click on that then that sends a signal to LinkedIn to express that you think that there was some AI slop content in that post. I updated my apps, my LinkedIn apps, this morning and I got the feature on my iPhone.

So, on iOS I got this feature. Updated the iPad version of my LinkedIn mobile app and didn't get the feature, and then looked on desktop and did have the feature there. So, on 2 of my 3 methods of accessing LinkedIn, so my desktop and iPhone, I've got this feature, but not on my iPad. Not quite sure why that would be.

Also, I found that if you copy the link to a post, so you're browsing your feed, you spot a post, maybe you want to have a deeper look at it, you might copy it and copy the link to it and open it in its own window so it's the only thing you're seeing then. In that case, there is no seems like AI slop button.

So, you only get this when you're just browsing your feed with all of the other posts at the same time. So, that doesn't quite make sense to me. So, for example, imagine you copy a link and you send it to someone via direct message, or you send it via email. You might say to the other person, does this look like AI to you? And that person then looks at the post. They don't have an option of flagging it as AI slop. So, that doesn't seem to make sense.

And I posted about this publicly today, as I'm recording this on Friday, and a few people in the comments were a bit concerned about the new feature, saying that they thought that it could be used to sort of unfairly negatively affect the content distribution of a content creator.

So, for example, if you see some content that you just simply don't like because you don't like the creator of that content, there would be nothing to stop you hitting the 3 dots and saying, seems like AI slop. And if enough people did that, then maybe it would send a strong negative signal to LinkedIn.

Now, LinkedIn did respond to someone's comment about this and said that they're not looking for signals about specific posts; it's more about analysing trends.

And I suppose if they got a lot of seems like AI slop clicks from a for a particular person, then I guess there would be the potential to limit the visibility of that person's content.

But it sounds to me if they're looking for trends, if they're analysing that data in that way, it would probably take a really concerted effort to try and drag a content creator down.

So, that hopefully, I mean, I might just be a bit too optimistic here, but hopefully that means that people aren't likely to suffer negative impacts from people who are just out there for malicious reasons, and it really will then be used to mark out what we term as AI slop in the feed.

It's interesting that they're also doing this at the same time that they're removing an option to enhance your post with AI. I never really liked that feature.

I think any kind of AI enhancement LinkedIn have said will now be around sort of proofreading existing words that are there as opposed to doing any sort of rewriting. So, I'm fully behind that. Time will tell whether this actually helps clean up our feeds. Don't know.

And as with most LinkedIn features, if something doesn't get used, LinkedIn tend to pull it from service to strip things down to what needs to be shown. So, if people don't use the feature, then it will go, might go, might well go away in a few months.

So, look out for that anyway, see if you've got the option and see how much AI slop actually appears in your feed. I was taking a quick scroll earlier, didn't actually see anything that I would want to flag as AI.

So, maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones and I don't get very much of this stuff in the feed.

What would be more useful, and again, people who commented on my post said the same is maybe you should be able to mark not posts but comments as being AI slop, because that would stop the bots going out and leaving thousands upon thousands of fake comments on other people's posts. So, I'm a bit surprised also that LinkedIn didn't start there with an AI slop option for comments and then maybe upgrading that to posts.

They've just started with posts and there's no sign of anything coming for comments just yet. Anyway, brand new, haven't tested it yet because literally only just got that this morning. But look out for it: the "Seems like AI slop" button.

I'll finish briefly on a topic that we talked about last time, which is the introduction of the collaborative posts feature on LinkedIn.

So, just to clarify, this is different from collaborative articles which were around many months ago now, where LinkedIn was just gathering feedback from members in order to kind of enhance the value of its articles for SEO purposes, something that benefited LinkedIn rather than its members. And they would give out badges if you were a contributor. So, this new collaborative post has nothing to do with that.

It's literally some person can write a post and they can invite up to 5 other people to be marked as collaborators on that post.

And if those people accept an invitation to be collaborators, then when the initial author of the post publishes, then that same content goes out on the feeds of up to 5 other of those collaborators and their name appears at the top as well.

I was hoping that I would have the feature by now, but I did post this morning and I wasn't given the option. I know what it looks like now, a little pop up button that lets you invite people to collaborate.

One other thing I've learned since last time is that you don't need to have the collaborative feature yourself in order to be invited by someone else who does have the feature.

So, a colleague of mine, for example, in my community who is writing something and wanted me to collaborate with them, if they've got the feature, they could write their post, invite me to collaborate, I could accept it, and then that post would go out in my name as well as theirs, even though I can't create a brand new collaborative post myself. So, that was an interesting little update that I've got there.

If you've got this and if you've used it, please let me know. I'm not particularly excited about this new feature, but nevertheless I do want to give it a try once I've got it. Seems to be a bit of a slow rollout, or at least it hasn't reached me yet on desktop or on mobile.

OK, that's all I've got for you for now, as usual. Please keep your questions coming. Drop me a line any time via DM or drop me an email if that's more suitable. Thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time.