Mop the slop from your LinkedIn feed with a new open-source Chrome extension

Decision-making AI model Jev has found another job: helping a Chrome extension identify and flag low-value writing on LinkedIn.

AI enthusiast, author, and business consultant Tom Frazier released Slop Mop as a Chrome extension on Tuesday, as well as publishing its code on GitHub for those who want to tinker with it on their own.

Frazier said it’s completely free, doesn’t require any signup, and doesn’t just filter out AI slop, either - it catches garbage written by humans too, actually.

The extension relies on nine signs drawn from research by SEO firm Graphite Growth into patterns that appear disproportionately often in AI-generated writing – a particularly relevant issue on LinkedIn.

AI-detection outfit Pangram classified 41 percent of the LinkedIn posts longer than 250 words in its sample as fully AI-generated, which doesn't include posts human authors use AI to improve.

The problem has become so bad that LinkedIn recently added a button to the platform that allows users to report posts as "Seems Like AI Slop." Slop Mop distills Graphite's much broader research into nine tells: Posts stop users from scrolling by including one line of text and a gap that requires viewers to extend the post, use lots of hype words, contain no-catch promises, are written with flowery language, contain a suspiciously neat lesson, are engagement bait, rely on empty praise, define terms by contrast, and are worded stiffly.

Those nine tells are what Slop Mop uses to identify potentially low-value writing, and two more questions are posed to prevent quality content from getting caught up in a Jevian purge: Whether what's written sounds like a particular person and whether it contains anything useful to readers.

Both of those questions lower the score, Frazier explains on Slop Mop's website.

A 12th question asks how likely it is that a model drafted the post, but that answer can only lower the slop score for writing that otherwise reads as human-written and cannot cause a post to be flagged on its own.

None of those factors alone will distinguish AI from human writing, we note - as does Frazier.

He describes Slop Mop less as an AI detector and more as a filter for eliminating internet garbage, no matter who or what writes it.

“Slop Mop flags poor human content equally to poor AI content,” Frazier told The Register.

“I feel that is the right decision because AI content can also be good and human content can also be bad.” The key question behind Slop Mop, Frazier writes in an FAQ on the extension’s website, is whether a post is worth your attention.