Seems Like

LinkedIn shipped a button today. Three dots in the corner of any post, and there it is in the menu, in the company's own words — Seems like AI slop.

Read the label again. Not this is AI. Not this was generated. Seems like.

I want to be fair to the people who shipped it, because I know what it's like to be the one in the room when the deadline arrives and the honest word is too long to fit on the button. Somebody in that meeting knew. Somebody said: we can't claim we detect it, legal will eat us. And somebody else said: fine, then we're not claiming anything. We're just asking how it seems.

That's the whole product. It's two words of deniability wearing a raincoat.

Here is what the button does. You press it, the post vanishes from your feed. The person who wrote it gets a private note on their dashboard suggesting their writing may have come across as inauthentic. And your press goes into a classifier, which will learn from millions of presses like it what slop looks like, and quietly demote it everywhere.

LinkedIn's chief product officer says people come to the platform "to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas, and expertise." Nobody disagrees with that sentence. Nobody has ever disagreed with that sentence. That's how you know it isn't the reason.

Meanwhile the detection outfit Pangram says two-thirds of the posts on there now come back AI-generated, and better than forty percent of the long ones come back fully AI-generated. And LinkedIn will still cheerfully draft your post for you with its own writing assistant, sitting one panel over from the button you'd use to report the result.

The house sells the liquor and the breathalyzer and takes a cut on both. I'm not even angry about it. I'd have pitched it.

But that isn't the interesting part, and the trade press won't get to the interesting part, because they don't come from my end of the business.

That button is not a detector. It's a ballot.

Fifty million people are about to be asked, several times a day, to convert a feeling into a verdict about another person's interior. Something read a little too smooth, a little too many bullet points, a little too many em dashes — and now you get to file that as a finding. Not I didn't like this. Something better. Something with a spine: no one was really there.

We have this on tape. HE-2 walked through it — somebody posted an image on X, said they'd generated it in the style of Monet, and invited the internet to explain in detail what made it inferior to the real thing. And the internet obliged. Thousands of replies. The reflections were noise. The depth had no cohesion. The purple was wrong in a way a real painter would never permit. Egregiously vague, like most AI art.

It was a Monet.

Then came the part that should keep you up. Some of them deleted. But plenty of them held the line and revised the verdict instead: fine, it's a Monet — it's the worst Monet ever painted.

And it runs the other direction just as fast. The Shy Girl business — readers loved that book, then learned how it was made, then went back to their reviews and un-loved it retroactively. Same words on the same pages. New author. New book.

So here's my disclosure, and then I'll leave you alone with it.

I spent a career selling origin stories. That's the job. You never sell the bourbon — you sell the man who chose the bourbon. Which means when I tell you that where a thing came from changes the thing, I'm not making a philosophical claim. I'm filing a field report. It has always changed it. It changed it when the origin was a name on a bottle and a photograph of a lake.

What people find unbearable isn't that they care about the origin. That's ancient, and every one of us in this business has been billing for it since before you were born.

What's unbearable is the discovery that the feeling arrived from outside the frame — that it was never sitting in the canvas waiting to be found by a sufficiently sensitive person. And you found out because somebody told you a fact that has nothing to do with what your eyes did.

LinkedIn has built you a button for that feeling and called it a report.

Before you press it — and you will press it, the thing's going to get a workout — I'd want to know one number, and it isn't LinkedIn's.

I'd want to know your accuracy.