LinkedIn just announced it is actively fighting back against what it and many others call “AI slop”: thoughtless, unoriginal, machine-generated images, posts, videos and comments being pumped online under the guise of “marketing.”
Based on a recent article, content creation on LinkedIn is up 14% year over year—and a whole lot of that 14% is the digital equivalent of gas station sushi.
To fight this, LinkedIn has built what it calls an “AI solving AI” system that detects generic, low-value posts and suppresses their distribution. Your slop won’t get deleted—it’ll just slowly suffocate in the dark, unseen.
They’re also going after the AI commenting bots that hammer out suspiciously polished responses on posts saying things like “Great insight! This really resonates with my journey.” Who talks like that? No self-respecting human in the history of civilization has ever said, “This really resonates with my journey” in casual conversation.
And it’s not just LinkedIn. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan made fighting AI slop a stated priority in his annual letter for 2026. Since July 2025, YouTube has aggressively demonetized mass-produced AI content and will continue to do so.
Back in December, they didn’t just demonetize two massive AI slop channels with a combined tens of millions of subscribers. They deleted them entirely. Gone. Four-point-seven billion lifetime views, wiped. Meta followed suit not long after, cracking down on “unoriginal content” on Facebook, demoting AI-generated spam accounts and stripping monetization from anything that looks like it came out of an AI copy-paste factory.
Here’s my warning to you: Every major platform is now actively punishing the exact strategy your “AI marketing guru” sold you last year.
If you think you’re going to solve your marketing problems by signing up for ChatGPT, copying a few prompts from some online course you took and putting ZERO real thought into your communications, you’re not just wasting time—you could be hurting your relationships, your brand and eventually get flagged and shut down.
We’re living in a trust recession and AI slop is making it worse every single day.
Your customers have already seen every AI trick in the book—the fake personalization, the disingenuous “heartfelt” message on LinkedIn that starts “I came across [insert your company’s name] and was impressed by your commitment to helping [insert target audience],” and other shenanigans.
This is what I call Prompt and Abdicate. You prompt it, post it and congratulate yourself for “doing social media.” But showing up with fake B.S. is not marketing. It’s noise.
In my book Trust-Based Marketing For IT Service Businesses—which I’m writing now, not prompting into existence, thank you very much—I lay out in detail why the fundamental challenge for MSPs has never been their ability to deliver great IT service. It’s their inability to earn trust before the sales conversation even starts.
And trust, it turns out, cannot be manufactured with FAKE prompts.
So, what ACTUALLY works?
First, use AI as an assistant, not the master.
I use AI. I use it for research. I use it to think through angles, proofread my work and create images. I use it to organize my ideas faster. I’m exploring how it can make my already-strong writing sharper, not replace the human being doing the thinking.
There’s a massive difference between using AI as a lever on your own authentic expertise and using AI as a replacement for having no expertise at all.
Here’s what LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and frankly your prospects are all telling you with one unified voice right now: original thinking, genuine expertise, and a real human perspective are the only things that will survive the AI content apocalypse. Everything else will be buried, demonetized, suppressed, or simply ignored into extinction.
Second, stop taking whatever ChatGPT spits out without question and start making a point of sounding like yourself. Use stories from your actual experience and history. Give your honest opinions, even ones that might make some prospects uncomfortable. Don’t be “perfect,” be human. Your competitor two towns over has the same ChatGPT subscription you do. He has access to the same prompts. The only thing YOU have that he does NOT is your life experience, your stories and your opinions. That’s your competitive moat. Stop filling it in.
Third—and this is something I’ve been preaching since long before AI was a household word—double down on offline and relationship-based marketing. Thoughtful, creative referral campaigns. In-person networking and events. Lunch-and-learn workshops. Joint ventures with other businesses who serve your ideal clients.
These channels are not “sexy.” They aren’t “cheap.” They require actual human effort. But they are also, right now, the least crowded and the most trusted methods for connecting with prospects and partners.
Mark Twain once said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” Right now, the majority is going all-in on AI to handle inbound calls, create all their content, take over creative work and respond to every e-mail. I’m cautiously optimistic about all of it and believe we should explore every tool available—but the majority is also flooding every channel with content nobody trusts, building brands nobody believes in, and wondering why none of it is working.
The minority—the ones who will win—are the ones willing to do the harder thing: show up as a real, specific, opinionated, flawed human being. In a world drowning in AI output, being undeniably human might just be your most powerful competitive advantage.
Nobody is going to hand you a pipeline of great clients because you can prompt like a master. You need a real marketing system and sales process— one built on strategy, not shortcuts and fake, empty content. I’ve helped thousands of MSPs go from invisible to undeniable, and I can do the same for you. Click here to hire me as your CRO and coach.
