The amount of AI-generated content you scroll through might be far greater than you think, according to a new study by AI detection platform, Pangram.
Pangram asked users of its Chrome extension to opt into sharing their browsing results with the platform. From those results, Pangram used its AI detection model — which has a 0.01% false positive rate, according to the company — to scan nearly one million posts that users scrolled through across the internet over the course of two months.
Pangram only scanned posts that users came across — meaning that AI slop is not just contained to spam sites, but actually prevalent on the social media platforms humans most frequent, including LinkedIn, X, Medium, Reddit and Substack.
On X, a quarter of long-form content was fully written by AI, but another 23% were AI-assisted. While Substack was the long-form platform with the lowest rate of AI-written content, more than one-fifth of its posts were flagged as AI-generated or AI-assisted.
But LinkedIn had the worst of AI-generated long-form content, the Pangram data suggests.
More than 40% of LinkedIn posts longer than 250 words were flagged as being fully written by AI. And while LinkedIn made up for a third of Pangram’s scanned content, posts on the platform accounted for nearly two-thirds of all the AI content flagged.
Pangram further determined that top-level LinkedIn posts were 1.35 times more likely to be AI-generated than a comment. Still, LinkedIn comments were slightly more likely to be generated by AI compared to top-level posts on other platforms.
LinkedIn includes a built-in “Enhance post” button that offers users AI writing assistance on their posts, making the process of using AI simple and easy.
In response to a comment request from Fast Company, LinkedIn pointed to a May post from global editorial executive editor Laura Lorenzetti, announcing that the platform would detect and downrank content that appears to be AI-generated so users would see it less on their feeds.
“While AI can be a helpful tool for refining language, we’re seeing a rise in what many call ‘AI slop,’ content that is low-effort, AI-generated content that may sound polished on the surface but lacks any real unique perspective or substance,” Lorenzetti wrote in the post. “When AI is overused, especially at scale and in an automated way, it dilutes the valuable insights that real human conversations can spark.”
