A LinkedIn exec is fed up with AI slop, which might strike some as ironic given that LinkedIn itself has struggled to keep AI content in check.
In a recent post, Ryan Roslansky, a Microsoft EVP responsible for LinkedIn, Microsoft Office, Outlook, and Teams, complained that someone had sent him “what was clearly an AI-generated doc.” After realizing it was AI, he actually asked his AI to summarize it, “and ended up with nothing that brought new thinking to the idea.”
This, he argues, is “a doom loop” that could leave us with “a very expensive way to avoid writing and reading in an ocean of sameness, genericness.”
Microsoft has pushed its Copilot AI hard, to the point that it recently pulled back on some integrations following complaints. On LinkedIn, the influx of AI tools has led to a flood of AI slop posts. It got bad enough that LinkedIn added a feature where you can click to report something that “seems like AI slop.” (And over a million people have taken advantage of that button.)
But while execs like Roslansky and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma have bemoaned “soulless AI slop,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is not a fan of that characterization. “We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication,” he said in March. Still, Roslansky’s LinkedIn post earned the thumbs-up from fellow Microsoft employees, including President Brad Smith.
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Roslansky is unlikely to ditch AI. He released a book in March, titled Open to Work, about how to make the most of AI in the workplace. (Presumably, one of the rules is to avoid maxing out your tokens.) But he’s correct that replacing human communication with AI summaries is no way to run an organization. He also touches on a real concern of AI regression: who wants to read things that sound exactly the same?
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Jon Martindale
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Jon Martindale is a tech journalist from the UK, with 20 years of experience covering all manner of PC components and associated gadgets. He’s written for a range of publications, including ExtremeTech, Digital Trends, Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, and Lifewire, among others. When not writing, he’s a big board gamer and reader, with a particular habit of speed-reading through long manga sagas.
Jon covers the latest PC components, as well as how-to guides on everything from how to take a screenshot to how to set up your cryptocurrency wallet. He particularly enjoys the battles between the top tech giants in CPUs and GPUs, and tries his best not to take sides.
Jon’s gaming PC is built around the iconic 7950X3D CPU, with a 7900XTX backing it up. That’s all the power he needs to play lightweight indie and casual games, as well as more demanding sim titles like Kerbal Space Program. He uses a pair of Jabra Active 8 earbuds and a SteelSeries Arctis Pro wireless headset, and types all day on a Logitech G915 mechanical keyboard.
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