LinkedIn’s Crackdown On AI Slop Gives Leaders An Opportunity To Stand Out And Build Trust

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spent his childhood summers at his grandfather's cattle ranch in Texas. There, he learned lessons that would serve him well when he started Amazon, like grit, resilience, and self-reliance.

Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang worked at Denny's as a dishwasher before being promoted to busboy. He, too, learned qualities that would serve him as an entrepreneur: humility, hospitality, and taking pride in his work no matter how mundane.

How do we know these stories? Bezos and Huang have repeated them in interviews and public presentations. Those experiences are unique to them. No other person—and no AI tool—can replicate your authentic lived experience.

That lesson is behind LinkedIn's initiative to "stem the flow of artificially-produced thought leadership," according to The Wall Street Journal . While people might think that AI makes them better communicators, relying too heavily on it often results in "generic or inauthentic" posts. LinkedIn is introducing a "seems like AI slop" button to flag posts and improve the user experience.

LinkedIn is far from the only platform wrestling with the flood of AI generated content. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat are among the others tightening their policies around mass produced, generic content. They're getting the message from users who want genuine, authentic, and human-first content.

The trend is a leader's opportunity to stand out and build trust. How? By tapping into something uniquely human—the ability to create emotional connections through the stories we share.

What LinkedIn Considers Content Worth Reading

According to LinkedIn executives, both the company and its subscribers benefit when readers consider their time on the platform a good investment. Posts worth a read are often those that "make you better at your job or the job you wish you had."

In its own announcement this summer, LinkedIn defined AI slop as "low-effort, AI-generated content that may sound polished on the surface but lacks any real unique perspective or substance." When people automate their posts to favor quantity over quality, it "dilutes the valuable insights that real human conversations can spark."

In my research for Viral Voices , an audiobook original on communication and storytelling skills for the digital age, I interviewed neuroscientists and AI engineers who explained how Large Language Models (LLMs) work and how the human brain works. Once you understand the difference, you'll be in a better position to generate the kind of content people consider a good return on their time.

Share The Stories Only You Can Tell

Let's return to Huang's experience at Denny's to highlight the difference.

AI can generate a maxim from the enormous database of human knowledge. And it can do so in seconds. For example, Great leaders stay humble and never consider any job beneath them . It's perfectly good advice. It's also generic.

According to neuroscientists, generic is forgettable because the human brain looks for things in its environment that are new and novel, something it hasn't seen or heard before. It also favors concrete ideas over abstract ones that are difficult for the brain to process.

Huang's story is certainly novel and surprising because people don't expect it from the CEO of the world's first $5 trillion company. Where the maxim is abstract and forgettable, Huang's story is concrete and paints a visual in the mind's eye: a teenager washing dishes, cleaning toilets, and bussing tables at a pancake house—and performing every task with pride.

Stories transform abstract ideas into concrete lessons that are ultimately memorable and actionable because they connect with people on a deeper emotional level.

AI tools still have an important role to play. LinkedIn does not intend to eliminate AI entirely from content creation. "It's ok to use AI to help you write, but your posts and comments need to represent your voice and your perspectives," according to LinkedIn's release. "The ultimate value comes from the human behind the tool."

Use AI to synthesize information, conduct research, suggest outlines, or improve poorly written sentences that are hard to understand. The key is to assign AI the tasks it does best without outsourcing the one thing that makes you stand out as a leader—insights from a lived experiences only you can share.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com