Credit: Jan Antonin Kolar via Unsplash
AI slop is flooding social media, with more machine created content at LinkedIn than other platforms, according to research by detection service Pangram.
The study, based on scanning 1,002,627 posts, found one in four longform posts on social media is fully AI-generated.
Of all posts flagged as AI-generated, two-thirds came from LinkedIn and nearly half of X (formerly Twitter) articles contained AI writing.
AI slop, a label for low-quality, mass-produced content generated by artificial intelligence, isn’t deadly but can be dangerous for advertisers.
It’s all about gaming the system. The high volume content, often mimicking quality, can draw advertisers away from premium publishers.
The data for the study came from Pangram’s Chrome extension which lets users scan posts on social media as they scroll, flagging AI-generated content.
“We believe it's important to understand this problem so that we can better combat it,” Pangram said.
“That's why we included an opt-in setting in our Chrome extension, to allow users to aid our research by anonymously sharing their scan statistics with us.”
The average AI rate across all scanned items was 13.8%, but specific rates varied by platform and item length.
On four out of five platforms, longer content was more likely to be AI-generated than shortform content.
Across all platforms, one in four longform items (25.72% of items over 250 words) were fully AI-generated.
Substack was an exception. The rate of fully AI-generated content remained fairly flat, and longer, more substantial posts were slightly less likely to be AI-generated compared to shorter ones.
LinkedIn was the most AI-saturated platform, where more than 40% of longform posts flagged as fully AI-generated.
“Contrary to what one might expect, people are overwhelmingly willing to use AI to speak on their behalf in professional settings that are associated with their real identity, and less likely to use it on casual and anonymous platforms,” Pangram said.
“LinkedIn also encourages AI use on its platform in several ways, including a built-in ‘Write with AI’ button (now rebranded ‘Enhance post,’ but still offering AI writing assistance).
“People are noticing LinkedIn's growing reputation for slop – perhaps to combat it, an executive at LinkedIn recently announced that the platform would be detecting and downranking AI-generated posts using an in-house algorithm; ironically, the announcement was itself AI-generated.
“Whether or not the company is attempting to modulate AI in their feed, our users are still seeing a lot of AI writing on LinkedIn.”
If mixed AI and human content is included, X/Twitter was the worst off: almost half of X articles were either fully AI-generated (23.9%) or AI-assisted/mixed (22.9%), with only 53.2% of X articles flagging as fully human-authored.
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