- If you're a job seeker, most of the jobs are fake for pretend growth optics.
- If you're a senior level or executive you're targeted non-stop by sales people telling you about "the conversations they're having ..."
- If you're looking for actual thought leadership or interesting information, you're bombarded with random tik-tok style videos, totally contrived stories and "lessons" to how ordering at Starbucks is like managing cloud infrastructure
It's turned into a completely artificial and useless community because Microsoft chased the same growth and engagement metrics as Facebook did, now no one considers it to be a place for serious discussion.
I'm convinced that the internet is mostly dead at this point. Sites like reddit or this one don't ask people for their identity. Nothing on here could be real and we'd be none the wiser.
Social Media, Especially Reddit, is getting worse by the minute, vibe coding spam, AI bots filling subs with AI garbage links & comments, mods calling it quit because of the amount of junk they have to deal with it. IT IS EVERYWHERE... AI music on Spotify, AI pull requests on github, AI videos on youtube,... it's gonna kill the internet...
Product and service reviews are completely useless now too, and have been for a while. Restaurant ratings are pure noise, everything is 4 stars and there is absolutely no correlation to the quality of food or service. None of it is real.
Good riddance. Reviews are just other people telling you how to live your life. Beyond it being subjective to the reviewer, there's really no upside in engaging with reviews. If it's a bad review, now you feel bad about having wanted to engage with something with abysmal scores (think: liking a movie then finding out it has a 32% on rotten tomatoes), or if it's a good review, it's useless because you were already going to engage with the thing being reviewed. You chose the restaurant for a reason, right? It sounded good.
We should get back to having our own experiences regardless of what the consensus says. If it looks good _to you_, it might just be good _for you_.
>We should get back to having our own experiences regardless of what the consensus says
No, some places are quite literally a scam or somewhere you can get food poisoning. I find higher signal in 1 star reviews to avoid these places as there is a real cost not just subjective experience.
AI content is everywhere period, conditioning people and other AI in the propagation of more AI content.
I started to see articles about mycorrhizal fungi pop up on sites and LLMs. In January of 2026 an evolutionary biologist won a prize regarding the fungi, there were some interviews and media items surrounding it. But then I could trace the original media items to AI content aggregators, which led to other AI generated posts about mycorrhizal fungi, and some of that entered LLM training data, causing LLMs to bring up the topic.
And here I am, a human, writing about it, which may get consumed into training pipelines and help disseminate the idea into the future even further.
Beyond the OP's AI-written or AI assisted distinction, I'm also noticing people mimicking LLM's speech patterns. I've read blogs from people who I'm quite sure are above pasting AI output directly into their words who nevertheless are sounding more and more like AI as the sum of all their conversations with Claude begins to rub off on them (myself included, probably)
I have noticed that sometimes in lists I have had the "The ... Solution: ..." sort of repetition. It is probably pre-existing but now that LLMs overuse it I actually am trying to adapt my speech patterns to not, because patterns LLMs overuse quickly become very grating to me.
I suppose it stands to reason: LLMs were trained on human writing, and overuse certain tropes and patterns because those patterns are commonly represented in human writing. But many people aren't particularly adept writers, and they're going to turn to AI to either do their writing or inform how they write. The trope ends up reinforcing itself as people just start to think that AI output is just what normal writing looks like.
Maybe I don't use LinkedIn that much, but I saw it especially on X and Reddit... Just today I was on a Reddit post and saw so many AI sloppish comments from people trying to farm karma
Twitter and Reddit were already on their way to being terrible, but the automation of the worst of what those places were becoming is now available to everyone.
My feeling is that it interferes a lot with "the social media algorithms" and hence with the "infinite wall of random stuff from people you don't know".
In the last few years I have been going back to RSS feeds, subscribing to blogs I like. What I lose there is that I don't get suggestions for blogs I don't already know.
I genuinely wonder if there could be an opportunity for webrings there. Like blogs could have an RSS feed of "blogs I follow" by the author, and I could choose to follow them or at least visit them and selectively subscribe.
The thing is that many times, there is one article I like in a blog but not necessarily the rest. So more than "blogs I follow", it could be "articles I liked". So that if I subscribe to the RSS feed of someone, I get exposed to articles they "bookmarked", and eventually it can help me discover blogs I want to subscribe to.
Or maybe it all exists already. Or used to exist, probably.
It amusing that Musk attempted to reverse his purchase of Twitter by citing the number of bots, and then research like this comes out alleging that now 29% of the X's long form articles are fully AI.
It's not exactly the same thing, of course, but still interesting the extent to which this type of content is viewed as the business opportunity for him.
Pangram doesn't work, and I wish people would stop treating it as gospel (but the AI/anti-AI grift is real). Here's a fun paradox: I can literally tell ChatGPT: "Say X" and it will say "X"—so that's a case where content is both AI generated and not. What if it changes a few words? Moves some sentences around? Where does something go from human- to AI-generated? (This is the classic Sorites paradox.)
Pangram tries to look for common patterns (rule of three, em dashes, etc.) but these are heuristic methods and not to be taken as gospel. There is no provable method to make a distinction between AI and human-generated other than the fact that AI-generated text tends to reek of pseudo-intellectual undergrad with a thesaurus.
Can confirm, this pushed me to delete the LinkedIn a few months ago and haven't looked back. It was at one time a professional portfolio, now I consider it a huge red flag if a company even questions why I do not have a LinkedIn. If you want references I will provide them. Social media is not a job requirement for any position I'm interested in.
I did the same but I'm aware that LinkedIn is probably how people got in touch with me in the past, eventually leading to a job. So I'm waiting before not having looked back until the next time I need a job :) Regardless, it's not the world I want to live in anymore so you just gotta disconnect.
I find it kind of concerning that it's so much better to have serious (eg scientific or emotionally charged) discussions with a bot than with any human at all, online or in real life.
Was just thinking today, -- happened to login to LinkedIn, open it up and the entire front page is just AI slop being applauded and liked with people seriously interacting with it as if it's somebody didn't just shit it out in 20s with zero effort. The whole thing needs to die so badly.
On Instagram, I'll get fed "real" content, but you read the description and it's this giant 3-4 paragraph thing that I don't bother to read because I know with certainty that it's AI slop. Before AI, the descriptions of sports videos or meme videos were 2 sentences, now they're entire theses.
The only people left reading this crap are people that still haven't caught up with the concept of AI slop
LinkedIn is definitely flooded with AI slop, but we also need to keep in mind that Pangram really doesn't work that well. I just tried it, wrote a few sentences about my day, and it was flagged as AI-generated (which doesn't surprise me since these tools are known to easily flag writing from people whose native language is not English [1]). I am really suspicious of the 0.1% false positive rate they claim to achieve.
LinkedIn is basically unusable at this point. I actually did used to use it a fair amount before but I've since deleted it and just use email notifications to see any notifications from recruiters.
What I don't get is how these people don't feel shame in their super obvious blatant use of LLMs for everything, even responding to posts. Maybe it's just me but when I'm attaching things to my name like that, I would absolutely not want everything to be obviously slop shit. Do they think people can't tell or something? I know at least every technical person I know can immediately tell (most of the time) when writing is LLM generated.
These are the rubes who buy into the desperate messaging that AI is "inevitable". It doesn't occur to them that their behavior is absurd and empty because they think it's what everyone else is doing too. Why question a decision you see as outside the boundary of your free will?
almost all platforms are like this now. Every active player in each of these platform is trying to get the most eyeballs in their content / profile. and the silent scrollers are not contributing anything else anyway.
We've societally come to the consensus that, we want to reward a race to the bottom slop. passive scrollers by not doing anything about it, active posters by contributing to it.
but there is no way else to win in this game.
A friend of mine writes the most human curated thoughtful newsletter about AI, spending 100 hours. and maybe 200 people know of its existence.
LinkedIn has become an AI-slopped wasteland. It’s like the opposite of when boomers found Facebook, which was the weirdest melting pot of zero-integrity posts and comments.
Now we have these tech-savvy people generating worthless images and producing generic, emoji-infested takeaways.
It's still pretty bad at pixel art, and just has this generic look visually. I remember watching this video of this indy game developer that tried to hire an artist for some visuals for cover art for his game, and kept getting sent AI generated stuff by scammers. Finally he did find a real artist, and the cover was really good. But expensive.
" but we don't believe it's inevitable."
Best get believing pal, because not only is it inevitable, it represents the last evolution in our societies output. There will be slop from now until eternity. Recalibrate your aesthetics, because everything is going to look like model output.
The detection model is flawed, and snake-oil at best. 仕方がない (shikata ga nai).
The question is not whether something is AI generated. That's the default state now. Question whether it is human, the economics are exceedingly in the favor of this new normal.
https://javiergonzalez.io/blog/the-economics-of-slop/
Same here, I hate it. Instead of just reading I find myself also dedicating brain power trying to decide if it's worth reading or not based on the first few sentences... if someone can't put in the effort to actually write something themselves I absolutely do not want to put in the effort to read it.
I especially detest the constant romanticization of losing sleep, injuries, and abusing oneself to achieve a business result, which seems to be a constant theme of most of this AI generated content. Some of the incidents might be real but they shouldn't be romanticized.
Without naming names I saw one post where a certain team was taken to a high altitude location to lock down together and the founder was proud of people using oxygen and still getting work done.
This isn't just a spam problem, it's a technology making mediocre content economically viable at unprecedented scale. /s
If I see a post that starts with this type of sentence structure I don't even bother to read any of it. I feelt like this happens on LinkedIn the most, so I'm happy to finally have some data to back up my observations.
LinkedIn is totally useless at this point.
- If you're a job seeker, most of the jobs are fake for pretend growth optics. - If you're a senior level or executive you're targeted non-stop by sales people telling you about "the conversations they're having ..." - If you're looking for actual thought leadership or interesting information, you're bombarded with random tik-tok style videos, totally contrived stories and "lessons" to how ordering at Starbucks is like managing cloud infrastructure
It's turned into a completely artificial and useless community because Microsoft chased the same growth and engagement metrics as Facebook did, now no one considers it to be a place for serious discussion.
In my view, LinkedIn has never really been a place for serious discussion.
> If you're a job seeker, most of the jobs are fake for pretend growth optics.
Maybe, but it continues to be one of the best places to find work.
Where is? I've gotten about 2 interviews via Linkedin, wellfound has little which are the two I know most, Indeed is more useless than even LinkedIn.
I used to have decent luck with Who is hiring threads but not recently as there's relatively little for mid level engineers.
The job market is completely out of whack
I'm convinced that the internet is mostly dead at this point. Sites like reddit or this one don't ask people for their identity. Nothing on here could be real and we'd be none the wiser.
I'm real xutopia. I'm real.
I can't tell if your comment is LLM generated or not. What's the point of even reading comments anymore I should just ask claude what it thinks.
Social Media, Especially Reddit, is getting worse by the minute, vibe coding spam, AI bots filling subs with AI garbage links & comments, mods calling it quit because of the amount of junk they have to deal with it. IT IS EVERYWHERE... AI music on Spotify, AI pull requests on github, AI videos on youtube,... it's gonna kill the internet...
I might be a dog for all you know (though I neither confirm nor deny this), but I assure you I'm real.
Product and service reviews are completely useless now too, and have been for a while. Restaurant ratings are pure noise, everything is 4 stars and there is absolutely no correlation to the quality of food or service. None of it is real.
It's bleak out there, on the internet.
Good riddance. Reviews are just other people telling you how to live your life. Beyond it being subjective to the reviewer, there's really no upside in engaging with reviews. If it's a bad review, now you feel bad about having wanted to engage with something with abysmal scores (think: liking a movie then finding out it has a 32% on rotten tomatoes), or if it's a good review, it's useless because you were already going to engage with the thing being reviewed. You chose the restaurant for a reason, right? It sounded good.
We should get back to having our own experiences regardless of what the consensus says. If it looks good _to you_, it might just be good _for you_.
>We should get back to having our own experiences regardless of what the consensus says
No, some places are quite literally a scam or somewhere you can get food poisoning. I find higher signal in 1 star reviews to avoid these places as there is a real cost not just subjective experience.
If I can't tell the difference, why would it matter?
The problem is when I can eventually tell the difference.
AI content is everywhere period, conditioning people and other AI in the propagation of more AI content.
I started to see articles about mycorrhizal fungi pop up on sites and LLMs. In January of 2026 an evolutionary biologist won a prize regarding the fungi, there were some interviews and media items surrounding it. But then I could trace the original media items to AI content aggregators, which led to other AI generated posts about mycorrhizal fungi, and some of that entered LLM training data, causing LLMs to bring up the topic.
And here I am, a human, writing about it, which may get consumed into training pipelines and help disseminate the idea into the future even further.
Beyond the OP's AI-written or AI assisted distinction, I'm also noticing people mimicking LLM's speech patterns. I've read blogs from people who I'm quite sure are above pasting AI output directly into their words who nevertheless are sounding more and more like AI as the sum of all their conversations with Claude begins to rub off on them (myself included, probably)
I have noticed that sometimes in lists I have had the "The ... Solution: ..." sort of repetition. It is probably pre-existing but now that LLMs overuse it I actually am trying to adapt my speech patterns to not, because patterns LLMs overuse quickly become very grating to me.
I caught myself saying "push back" the other day. I've never said it before, it's a Claude-ism.
I suppose it stands to reason: LLMs were trained on human writing, and overuse certain tropes and patterns because those patterns are commonly represented in human writing. But many people aren't particularly adept writers, and they're going to turn to AI to either do their writing or inform how they write. The trope ends up reinforcing itself as people just start to think that AI output is just what normal writing looks like.
Maybe I don't use LinkedIn that much, but I saw it especially on X and Reddit... Just today I was on a Reddit post and saw so many AI sloppish comments from people trying to farm karma
Twitter and Reddit were already on their way to being terrible, but the automation of the worst of what those places were becoming is now available to everyone.
My feeling is that it interferes a lot with "the social media algorithms" and hence with the "infinite wall of random stuff from people you don't know".
In the last few years I have been going back to RSS feeds, subscribing to blogs I like. What I lose there is that I don't get suggestions for blogs I don't already know.
I genuinely wonder if there could be an opportunity for webrings there. Like blogs could have an RSS feed of "blogs I follow" by the author, and I could choose to follow them or at least visit them and selectively subscribe.
The thing is that many times, there is one article I like in a blog but not necessarily the rest. So more than "blogs I follow", it could be "articles I liked". So that if I subscribe to the RSS feed of someone, I get exposed to articles they "bookmarked", and eventually it can help me discover blogs I want to subscribe to.
Or maybe it all exists already. Or used to exist, probably.
It amusing that Musk attempted to reverse his purchase of Twitter by citing the number of bots, and then research like this comes out alleging that now 29% of the X's long form articles are fully AI.
It's not exactly the same thing, of course, but still interesting the extent to which this type of content is viewed as the business opportunity for him.
Pangram doesn't work, and I wish people would stop treating it as gospel (but the AI/anti-AI grift is real). Here's a fun paradox: I can literally tell ChatGPT: "Say X" and it will say "X"—so that's a case where content is both AI generated and not. What if it changes a few words? Moves some sentences around? Where does something go from human- to AI-generated? (This is the classic Sorites paradox.)
Pangram tries to look for common patterns (rule of three, em dashes, etc.) but these are heuristic methods and not to be taken as gospel. There is no provable method to make a distinction between AI and human-generated other than the fact that AI-generated text tends to reek of pseudo-intellectual undergrad with a thesaurus.
Can confirm, this pushed me to delete the LinkedIn a few months ago and haven't looked back. It was at one time a professional portfolio, now I consider it a huge red flag if a company even questions why I do not have a LinkedIn. If you want references I will provide them. Social media is not a job requirement for any position I'm interested in.
> and haven't looked back
I did the same but I'm aware that LinkedIn is probably how people got in touch with me in the past, eventually leading to a job. So I'm waiting before not having looked back until the next time I need a job :) Regardless, it's not the world I want to live in anymore so you just gotta disconnect.
I find it kind of concerning that it's so much better to have serious (eg scientific or emotionally charged) discussions with a bot than with any human at all, online or in real life.
Also, in case you didn't already know, I saw a headline announcing that the sky is usually blue.
Was just thinking today, -- happened to login to LinkedIn, open it up and the entire front page is just AI slop being applauded and liked with people seriously interacting with it as if it's somebody didn't just shit it out in 20s with zero effort. The whole thing needs to die so badly.
On Instagram, I'll get fed "real" content, but you read the description and it's this giant 3-4 paragraph thing that I don't bother to read because I know with certainty that it's AI slop. Before AI, the descriptions of sports videos or meme videos were 2 sentences, now they're entire theses.
The only people left reading this crap are people that still haven't caught up with the concept of AI slop
LinkedIn is definitely flooded with AI slop, but we also need to keep in mind that Pangram really doesn't work that well. I just tried it, wrote a few sentences about my day, and it was flagged as AI-generated (which doesn't surprise me since these tools are known to easily flag writing from people whose native language is not English [1]). I am really suspicious of the 0.1% false positive rate they claim to achieve.
[1] https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-detectors-biased-against-no...
Oh yeah I can't wait for the next election. Things get so toxic when money/power is involved.
money/power will not be involved in the next election? Not sure if I completely follow your comment.
LinkedIn is basically unusable at this point. I actually did used to use it a fair amount before but I've since deleted it and just use email notifications to see any notifications from recruiters.
What I don't get is how these people don't feel shame in their super obvious blatant use of LLMs for everything, even responding to posts. Maybe it's just me but when I'm attaching things to my name like that, I would absolutely not want everything to be obviously slop shit. Do they think people can't tell or something? I know at least every technical person I know can immediately tell (most of the time) when writing is LLM generated.
These are the rubes who buy into the desperate messaging that AI is "inevitable". It doesn't occur to them that their behavior is absurd and empty because they think it's what everyone else is doing too. Why question a decision you see as outside the boundary of your free will?
The LinkedIn feed was Moltbook before anyone had the idea for Moltbook.
It's like a burgoo [1]. A steaming cauldron of community slop.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgoo
Hey, at least a bowl of burgoo tastes good, unlike some community slops.
almost all platforms are like this now. Every active player in each of these platform is trying to get the most eyeballs in their content / profile. and the silent scrollers are not contributing anything else anyway.
We've societally come to the consensus that, we want to reward a race to the bottom slop. passive scrollers by not doing anything about it, active posters by contributing to it.
but there is no way else to win in this game.
A friend of mine writes the most human curated thoughtful newsletter about AI, spending 100 hours. and maybe 200 people know of its existence.
I mean, who the hell ever read that utter garbage on LinkedIn anyway?
LinkedIn has become an AI-slopped wasteland. It’s like the opposite of when boomers found Facebook, which was the weirdest melting pot of zero-integrity posts and comments.
Now we have these tech-savvy people generating worthless images and producing generic, emoji-infested takeaways.
I read through LinkedIn posts and it's AI slop all the way down, it's horrendous. Every post is either written entirely by AI or mostly written by AI.
Tbh I’ve always treated it as three things:
1) Glorified Rolodex
2) Place too see which of my peers got promoted or moved dormant
3) Source material for /r/linkedinlunatics
Reading the crap in the feed has never been a thing
It's still pretty bad at pixel art, and just has this generic look visually. I remember watching this video of this indy game developer that tried to hire an artist for some visuals for cover art for his game, and kept getting sent AI generated stuff by scammers. Finally he did find a real artist, and the cover was really good. But expensive.
" but we don't believe it's inevitable." Best get believing pal, because not only is it inevitable, it represents the last evolution in our societies output. There will be slop from now until eternity. Recalibrate your aesthetics, because everything is going to look like model output. The detection model is flawed, and snake-oil at best. 仕方がない (shikata ga nai).
AI generated article to promote some product. What a great meta proof.
The question is not whether something is AI generated. That's the default state now. Question whether it is human, the economics are exceedingly in the favor of this new normal. https://javiergonzalez.io/blog/the-economics-of-slop/
Same here, I hate it. Instead of just reading I find myself also dedicating brain power trying to decide if it's worth reading or not based on the first few sentences... if someone can't put in the effort to actually write something themselves I absolutely do not want to put in the effort to read it.
I quit enjoy it tbf
the enslopification is pretty obnoxious.
On LinkedIn it's the only place where AI slop will be a huge improvement over the previous content.
Really no different than the content that is usually on LinkedIn. It's been a worthless dumpster fire for ten years at least.
I especially detest the constant romanticization of losing sleep, injuries, and abusing oneself to achieve a business result, which seems to be a constant theme of most of this AI generated content. Some of the incidents might be real but they shouldn't be romanticized.
Without naming names I saw one post where a certain team was taken to a high altitude location to lock down together and the founder was proud of people using oxygen and still getting work done.
Are we working for AI or is AI working for us?
This isn't just a spam problem, it's a technology making mediocre content economically viable at unprecedented scale. /s
If I see a post that starts with this type of sentence structure I don't even bother to read any of it. I feelt like this happens on LinkedIn the most, so I'm happy to finally have some data to back up my observations.