LinkedIn's "Seems like AI slop" button, and what it means for your DMs

On July 30, LinkedIn put a new option in the three-dots menu on every post: “Seems like AI slop”. Three weeks later, chief product officer Hari Srinivasan said over a million people had clicked it. He also said members were “now experiencing 40% less views on what we classify as AI slop” than a few weeks earlier.

What LinkedIn has said so far

Checked on September 24, 2026, from LinkedIn’s statements as reported by The Verge and Engadget:

• Where it is: the three-dots menu on a post. It’s a feed feature.
• What else shipped with it: “new and improved” classifiers that flag posts as AI, and the removal of the AI button that offered to “enhance” your post.
• What authors see: a notice in post analytics that reads “Some members told us this post seems like AI. We’re sharing this as feedback for you to consider for future posts.”
• How much it counts: unclear. Srinivasan said LinkedIn uses “many signals” to decide a post’s reach and has “built safeguards to help prevent individual feedback from being used to unfairly target other members.” Engadget reports LinkedIn had already cut reach for posts with common AI phrasing, like the “it’s not X, it’s Y” pattern.
• Why now: it came a few weeks after the AI detection company Pangram estimated that 41% of LinkedIn’s longform posts were fully AI-generated.

What LinkedIn hasn’t said is how many reports it takes, or what happens to an account whose posts get flagged a lot. Anyone who tells you the exact threshold is guessing.

It’s a posts button. Your DMs still have one.

There’s no slop button in LinkedIn messages. You won’t get a notice saying a prospect flagged your DM.

That doesn’t help much. The reader may stop at the first line of a DM preview. The post-report count says nothing about DM behavior, so it cannot measure that risk.

What an AI-written DM looks like

Most people can’t tell you why a message feels generated. They just stop reading. These are the usual giveaways:

• An opener that could go to anyone: “I hope this message finds you well”, “I came across your profile and was impressed”.
• A compliment with no detail in it: “your impressive background in growth”.
• The “it’s not X, it’s Y” turn, the one LinkedIn’s own feed ranking reportedly penalizes.
• Three adjectives in a row, three benefits in a row, three of everything.
• Punctuation nobody types on a phone, like the long em dash, from someone who never uses it anywhere else.
• A call to action with the energy of a webinar: “Would you be open to a quick 15-minute call to explore potential synergies?”

Here’s a message with most of them:

Hi Dana, I hope this message finds you well! I came across your profile and was truly impressed by your innovative approach to scaling revenue teams. At Acme, it's not just about automation, it's about empowering sales leaders to unlock growth. Would you be open to a quick 15-minute call to explore potential synergies?

And the same intent, written by someone who looked at her profile for thirty seconds:

Hi Dana, saw you went from 4 to 20 SDRs at Brightline in a year. What broke first, hiring or ramp?

The second one is shorter, has a real detail, and asks something she can answer in one line. You can write that with AI or without it.

Using AI without sending slop

Drafting with AI is fine. Sending what it drafts without reading it is the problem. A few rules that hold up:

1. Give it facts, not vibes. Paste the prospect’s actual recent post or job change into the prompt. “Personalize this” with no input gets you “impressive background”.
2. Delete the first sentence. The warm-up line is almost always the generated part.
3. Cut it in half. In one self-reported test of 300 messages, 30-50 words got replies 29% of the time, and over 75 words got 9%. AI drafts run long.
4. Read it out loud. If you wouldn’t say it to them at a conference, don’t send it.
5. Check the facts. Reopen the source for the detail you cited. A stale job change makes a short DM worse than a generic one.

For other reasons a message gets ignored, see No one responds to my LinkedIn messages. For situation-based openers, see 15 cold message templates for founders.

Where Dollar Outreach stands

Dollar Outreach prefills the templates you wrote in a sidebar on your LinkedIn tab. Review each message and click send yourself; it doesn’t generate an AI opening for you. The case for that manual step is in Why you click send.

Checked on 24 Sep 2026: LinkedIn’s statements and figures as reported by The Verge and Engadget on August 21, 2026 (linked above). LinkedIn hasn’t published how reports affect reach. The example messages are our own.