Editor
Dinesh Raj chevron_right
If your LinkedIn feed has started to read like it was written by a machine, you are not imagining it. LinkedIn has added a button that lets anyone flag a post as "Seems like AI slop," and for the roughly 10 million Malaysians who keep a profile there, it is a small change pointing at a much larger problem: the professional network many of us use to find work, hire and build a reputation is filling up with text that no person actually wrote.
The feature itself is simple. As TechCrunch reported, tapping the three-dot menu on any post now shows a "Seems like AI slop" option. Flagging a post hides it from your feed and, LinkedIn says, feeds a set of classifiers meant to push low-quality generated content further down the recommendations you see from outside your own network. The person who posted it gets a quiet nudge in their analytics dashboard, not a public strike.
Why bother? Because the scale is real. A study by the detection firm Pangram found that 40% of long-form posts and 30% of short ones on LinkedIn looked fully AI-generated, and the company says it has blocked billions of automated comment attempts in recent months. LinkedIn's chief product officer, Hari Srinivasan, framed the clean-up as a priority, arguing that people come to the platform for genuine perspectives, not filler.
For Malaysia, the sharpest edge is not vanity posting, it is hiring. LinkedIn counts about 10 million members here, close to 27.7% of the population and heavily weighted toward the 25-to-34 job-hunting years, according to DataReportal. That is the same pool where AI-polished CVs, generated cover letters and even deepfake candidates now circulate. One 2026 survey found that 72% of recruiters had run into AI-driven job fraud, and Gartner has warned that by the end of this year, roughly three in ten employers may struggle to tell a real face from a deepfake on a video call. A report-slop button does nothing about a fake applicant, but it is the same trust problem showing up in the feed first.
There is a catch worth naming. As Inc pointed out, the button asks ordinary users to guess what is machine-written, and people are not reliable detectors. A careful writer with a tidy style can be flagged as a bot, while a well-prompted fake sails through. Crowd reports are a signal, not a verdict, and the risk is that real Malaysians who simply write cleanly get buried alongside the actual slop.
So what should a Malaysian professional take from this? Two things. First, the feed is now a filtered space, so the posts that still travel are the ones carrying something a model cannot fake: a specific number, a real project, a genuine opinion with your name on it. Generic thought-leadership is exactly what the new button is built to sink. Second, if you hire, treat the inbox with the same suspicion the feed now gets, and verify a candidate live before you trust a polished application.
None of this is unique to LinkedIn. We have written about how AI now touches most Malaysian jobs without replacing them, and how Malaysia leads much of Asia on AI adoption. The slop button is the other side of that adoption: once everyone can generate content on demand, the scarce thing becomes proof that a human was actually there.
Image(s) courtesy of Clay Banks and Resume Genius on Unsplash.
