The Four Posts You Meet on LinkedIn

LinkedIn just added its fun and totally not controversial at all "Seems like AI slop" button.

This is fun timing for me. For the last 3 weeks, I have been collecting posts off of the platform and analyzing them, trying to figure out what's going on.

Why? Because something about how a lot of us are writing on LinkedIn these days is nagging at me.

At first I thought I was just pissed off that we were all using AI to write. You know the tells — the em dashes, the short sentences with short paragraphs, the oddly round numbered statistics, and super generic stories.

But then I realized, it's not just the pure AI-written posts that bother me. Sure, they are pure "slop," but we all know they are. No, the ones that have been frustrating me the most are the ones where someone writes a beautiful story, a heartfelt message, or a super personal narrative — but then AI absolutely neuters it.

That's when I realized that I really don't care about em dashes — I actually kind of love them still — but what I'm starving for is authenticity.

All that to say, after analyzing (yes, with AI) the content of 57 semi-random posts on LinkedIn, I have created a rubric for helping me understand what's happening on this here platform.

I — along with my handy-dandy AI assistant and a few em dashes — have identified at least four types of posts I have seen on LinkedIn.

Low Substance / High Pretense

These are the posts where it's low content, low meaning, and it's incredibly obvious it was written with AI. These are so low effort that it's almost laughable (We are laughing, right?). If you read these out loud to your kids, they would roll their eyes and say it's super not cool — or whatever kids are saying these days. No one knows why these are posted, or frankly, what in the world they really even mean. These posts are what that slop button is reserved for.

Low Substance / Low Pretense

Now, these posts aren't bad. They are just usually low-effort, low-thought posts. They make a good point... they are just... forgettable. We see them and think, "I guess... but why did you use AI to write and post this — or even post this at all?" Feel free to keep posting these; most of us will likely keep ignoring them.

High Substance / High Pretense

These are the posts with genuinely meaningful and obviously true stories about real people — but written with an AI prompt and some polish. These posts are where we try to "humanize" AI-produced content. These posts are well-intentioned — but in the end they land flat because a potentially beautiful story gets unintentionally neutered of its emotion and meaning. It's like dressing up for your wedding day in a corporate suit. The substance doesn't match the presentation.

High Substance / Low Pretense

Every once in a while, when all is right with the world, I come across a genuinely human post. It's not technically efficient; it's filled with extra words AI would never use, and fairly unvarnished. It's deeply meaningful and deeply human. These are the posts that, written in a plain voice, are a breath of fresh air on this platform. More of these please.

So what's my point?

I think I want to come back to my personal OG villain: efficiency.

It is faster to have a conversation with AI about a story or topic, feed it some details, and have it write a draft and then try to humanize it. Some of us aren't great writers, so it makes the writing process a lot easier. I get it, I genuinely do.

But easier doesn't always make it better. Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden, "now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."

I think that's what I am getting at.

I'm not trying to be the AI police here. But I genuinely would rather read a heartfelt post that was a little extra wordy and a little less technically perfect than one written by AI with all the humanity stripped away.

So many of us have beautiful stories to tell. Let's tell them with authenticity and depth.

Feel free to use em dashes and maybe even slip in an "it's not x, it's y" clause. Because at the end of the day, the issue isn't style, or em dashes, or weird AI writing styles. I can prompt AI to write without those things, and it can still lack substance and be full of pretense.

If it means you don't post as often, I think that's okay.