How the slop-ridden professional social network confirms Magnifica Humanitas’s warnings about AI’s threat to creativity.
How the slop-ridden professional social network confirms Magnifica Humanitas’s warnings about AI’s threat to creativity
‘T he first contribution we can make toward a more humane civilization,” Pope Leo XIV writes in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, “is to be mindful of our words.” The power of words and language is one of the unifying threads of the papal document, which explores the growth of artificial intelligence and its implications for life, work, war, and what it means to be human. It’s a theme very much connected to the Tower of Babel, one of the biblical images Leo chooses to frame the volume.
Babel, he warns, “was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion” [emphasis mine]. Reading these words, I couldn’t help but think about the homogenizing effect AI has had on words themselves for a large sector of the working world. Corporate jargon has long been with us, but if there’s one example of the kind of language that millions of Americans who work in tech associate with the age of AI, it’s the LinkedIn Slop Post.
What exactly is the LinkedIn Slop Post, or LSP? As with artificial intelligence itself, it’s impossible to offer a comprehensive definition. Still, one can identify two common elements of everything that falls into the category: (1) It’s an excessively long chunk of text posted on LinkedIn (but also more and more on X) about how helpful AI technology supposedly is to the person posting, and (2) the text itself is completely generated by AI.
A student of the genre, I first noticed the LSP take off sometime in mid-2024. It usually begins by announcing some sort of breakthrough enabled by AI — a new product, the latest model drop, a new use case for a given role, etc. After this follows a one-sentence “analysis” of the feat delivered in the classic AI construction of “It’s not X, it’s Y.” Here are a few examples, inspired by my own feed:
“Prototyping that used to take product managers three months now takes three hours. That’s not an evolution. It’s a revolution.”
“I just vibe-coded an entire go-to-market app on my morning walk through the park. That’s not a breakthrough. It’s a whole new game.”
“[XYZ AI model] just completely upended how sales teams think about outreach. It’s not just automation. It’s a foundation.”
Once the reader gets past this opener, he’s in for a long set of one- to two-sentence “paragraphs” elaborating the point. Midway through the post may be a “novel” bit of insight, prefaced with a line like, “But here’s the crazy part” or “Just think about what this means more broadly.” After several more one-sentence paragraphs, the LSP usually ends with an engagement-farming “call to action” soliciting others’ opinions: “Curious if other folks here are experiencing similar breakthroughs.” “I’d love to know how you’re AI-maxxing in your own role,” etc. The comments are usually few to non-existent, because most of us haven’t yet reached the level of depravity where we post responses (or even worse, AI-generated responses) to AI-generated posts.
In the LSP, we see the uniformity of emptiness that automating “thought” produces. It’s T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” for the social media age, “leaning together / headpiece filled with straw.” The LSP is “quiet and meaningless” as it enters and exits one’s feed — quiet because any real person with enough exposure to the genre will quickly spot the tells and scroll past, meaningless because it communicates nothing other than the poster’s nakedly performative gesture.
Are the authors of these posts (or, more accurately, the authors of the prompts that generated them) actually that enthused and amazed by the latest AI advancement du jour? Doubtful. The reality is that in a tech sector roiled by mass layoffs, employees constantly hearing about the impending elimination of their roles (and sometimes of all white-collar roles) view the LSP as a tool to keep their heads above water and “virtue signal” their continued utility. They do this through putting up posts celebrating their growing dependence on AI in work and at home alike to accomplish the most basic of tasks. The LSP is a symptom of a world that, as Pope Leo writes, risks “reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”
In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo contrasts the Tower of Babel with an alternative biblical image of technology: Nehemiah’s reraising of the destroyed walls of Jerusalem. Where the desire for domination animated the former, a desire for communion did so for the latter. Where Babel’s builders prized utility, Nehemiah prized his people’s dignity and community.
The contrast is clear when it comes to language. The temptation of AI is that it promises to close the gap between idea and execution by overcoming the “limits” inherent in the traditional creative process. And yet it’s out of that very process that the thoughts most worth reading or engaging with develop. “Between conception and creation” (to quote Eliot once more) is a system of push and pull, of testing ideas and coming up against limits, of finding inspiration when you least expect it. It’s a messy process that AI can play an important role in, as Leo himself makes clear. The risk in today’s AI-filled world is slipping from active creator to passive observer for the sake of efficiency.
“Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the ‘construction site’ of our time,” the pope exhorts us. Everyone has a part to play, however minuscule it may seem. “The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.” My own small act of fidelity today? Holding off on posting LinkedIn slop and getting my hands dirty writing this article instead.