Did you hear the one about the arsonist handing out smoke detectors? As we all know by now since it’s been posted about ad-nauseam, LinkedIn added a button that says “Seems like AI slop”. In its first two weeks, more than a million people clicked it. Read that as a product update and it’s overdue hygiene. Read it as data and it is a confession with a million signatures.

Because think about what a report button admits. Nobody ships a button for things people can handle on their own. There is no “Seems like a bad take” button, because you can tell a bad take when you see one, and you scroll. The slop button exists because a million professional readers, people who evaluate writing for a living, hit something in their feed and could no longer say what they were looking at. The click does not mean I found a machine. It means I am not sure anymore, and I would like someone to check.

That uncertainty did not come from nowhere. It was manufactured, on this platform, over about a decade, and the story of how …