40% long posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated, highest among social platforms: Study

The study found that Reddit had one of the lowest combined share of AI-generated content on any platform at just 4.4 per cent.

From career advice to leadership lessons, we have all come across those LinkedIn posts that make us roll our eyes or stop to like and learn from them. Odds are, these posts are AI-generated either way.

LinkedIn is the most AI-saturated major social media platform, with over 40 per cent of its long-form posts flagged as fully AI-generated, according to a new study recently published by AI detection startup Pangram. In its study, Pangram found that the Microsoft-owned social networking site accounted for nearly two-thirds of all posts classified as AI-generated.

AI-generated content on the platform has been normalised by LinkedIn’s own AI writing tools such as its ‘Enhance post’ feature, the study said. The findings of Pangram’s study are based on the company’s analysis of more than a million posts across major social media platforms, including LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Substack, and Medium.

It comes at a time when AI-generated content can be found across every online platform, suggesting that synthetic text has become a mainstream feature of online communication rather than a niche phenomenon. The report also serves as growing evidence of the impact of generative AI on online communication.

However, as AI-generated content becomes harder to distinguish from human writing, researchers have emphasised that detection scores should be treated as indicators rather than proof. Critics further argued that Pangram’s findings should be taken with a pinch of salt, since they tend to have high false-positive rates, especially when it comes to text written by non-native English speakers.

“AI writing is now a problem everywhere on social media. This is concerning, but it’s in line with what we’re seeing elsewhere online: researchers estimated that 35% of newly published websites on the open internet were AI-generated or AI-assisted,” Max Spero, CEO and co-founder, Pangram, said in the blog post.

“An internet that is completely flooded with undisclosed AI content is bleak, but we don’t believe it’s inevitable. We hope that by providing transparency to AI-generated content online, we can give internet users back some control of how they spend their attention,” Spero added.

Based on its analysis, Pangram found that Reddit had one of the lowest combined share of AI-generated content on any platform at just 4.4 per cent, despite having the highest scan volume of any platform with over 36.7 per cent items scanned by the researchers.

While replies on Reddit were overwhelmingly human-authored (98.1 per cent), top-level posts on the platform were much more likely to be AI-written, at 11.6 per cent of posts, in line with X/Twitter’s 10.0 per cent AI-saturation. The report attributed these numbers to Reddit’s spam policy which effectively eliminates accounts that use AI to automatically generate spam replies. However, this approach only works for low-effort spam content on the platform.

“Top-level Reddit posts only make up a quarter of all Reddit items, but they have far more audience impact, and their lower volume allows AI-authored posts to slip past volume-based moderation like rate-limiting,” as per the report. It also found that long-form content is most likely to be AI-generated, with four out of the five platforms, where one in four longform items (25.72 per cent of items over 250 words) were fully AI-generated.

The only exception to this trend of long posts being AI-generated is Substack, where the rate of fully AI-generated content remained fairly flat, and longer, more substantial posts were actually slightly less likely to be AI-generated compared to shorter ones.

From career advice to leadership lessons, we have all come across those LinkedIn posts that make us roll our eyes or stop to like and learn from them. Odds are, these posts are AI-generated either way.

LinkedIn is the most AI-saturated major social media platform, with over 40 per cent of its long-form posts flagged as fully AI-generated, according to a new study recently published by AI detection startup Pangram. In its study, Pangram found that the Microsoft-owned social networking site accounted for nearly two-thirds of all posts classified as AI-generated.

AI-generated content on the platform has been normalised by LinkedIn’s own AI writing tools such as its ‘Enhance post’ feature, the study said. The findings of Pangram’s study are based on the company’s analysis of more than a million posts across major social media platforms, including LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Substack, and Medium.

It comes at a time when AI-generated content can be found across every online platform, suggesting that synthetic text has become a mainstream feature of online communication rather than a niche phenomenon. The report also serves as growing evidence of the impact of generative AI on online communication.

However, as AI-generated content becomes harder to distinguish from human writing, researchers have emphasised that detection scores should be treated as indicators rather than proof. Critics further argued that Pangram’s findings should be taken with a pinch of salt, since they tend to have high false-positive rates, especially when it comes to text written by non-native English speakers.

“AI writing is now a problem everywhere on social media. This is concerning, but it’s in line with what we’re seeing elsewhere online: researchers estimated that 35% of newly published websites on the open internet were AI-generated or AI-assisted,” Max Spero, CEO and co-founder, Pangram, said in the blog post.

“An internet that is completely flooded with undisclosed AI content is bleak, but we don’t believe it’s inevitable. We hope that by providing transparency to AI-generated content online, we can give internet users back some control of how they spend their attention,” Spero added.

Based on its analysis, Pangram found that Reddit had one of the lowest combined share of AI-generated content on any platform at just 4.4 per cent, despite having the highest scan volume of any platform with over 36.7 per cent items scanned by the researchers.

While replies on Reddit were overwhelmingly human-authored (98.1 per cent), top-level posts on the platform were much more likely to be AI-written, at 11.6 per cent of posts, in line with X/Twitter’s 10.0 per cent AI-saturation. The report attributed these numbers to Reddit’s spam policy which effectively eliminates accounts that use AI to automatically generate spam replies. However, this approach only works for low-effort spam content on the platform.

“Top-level Reddit posts only make up a quarter of all Reddit items, but they have far more audience impact, and their lower volume allows AI-authored posts to slip past volume-based moderation like rate-limiting,” as per the report. It also found that long-form content is most likely to be AI-generated, with four out of the five platforms, where one in four longform items (25.72 per cent of items over 250 words) were fully AI-generated.

The only exception to this trend of long posts being AI-generated is Substack, where the rate of fully AI-generated content remained fairly flat, and longer, more substantial posts were actually slightly less likely to be AI-generated compared to shorter ones.