If you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, you’ll have certainly come across this type of phrasing: “This isn’t a job, it’s a calling” or “This isn’t marketing, it’s a movement” or “This isn’t a tool, it’s a paradigm shift.”
This sentence structure is saturating posts on the platform. It’s become one of the most recognisable patterns of AI-generated text: “It’s not X, it’s Y.”
If you’re like me, you find it annoying and scroll past as soon as you read it. Your exasperation is warranted. Negation can be a powerful literary device when used thoughtfully, but when unearned, it feels hollow.
That’s what AI slop — low-quality digital content generated by artificial intelligence, often with little or no human oversight — does: it turns previously useful markers into gobbledygook.
For most AI tropes currently in circulation, it’s enough to just ignore them. The negation form of AI slop, however, isn’t just annoying; it distorts how people process and remember information. Before you get the chance to absorb something meaningful, your attention is already anchored to what is not.
There’s a reason this structure feels off. Cognitive psychologists have known for decades that negation doesn’t work the way speakers intend it to. When someone tells you what something isn’t, your brain doesn’t skip to the alternative. It processes the negated concept first.
This was demonstrated in a 2003 study. After reading negated information, readers’ mental models still retained the negated concept at short processing intervals. Negation didn’t function as an eraser. The concept entered the reader’s mind, and only with additional processing time and contextual support could the reader move past it.
Every time you read “This isn’t marketing,” for example, you process marketing before you can get to whatever the writer claims it actually is.
That would be manageable if it happened once, but that cognitive load compounds with repetition.
In a classic 1987 experiment, psychologist Daniel Wegner asked participants not to think about a white bear. They couldn’t.
Those told to suppress the idea mentioned it more than once per minute. Worse, participants who had first tried to suppress the thought later showed a rebound effect, thinking about white bears significantly more than participants who had been free to think about them from the start.
The effort of pushing a concept away made it stick even harder.
When your LinkedIn feed delivers dozens of posts built on the same negation-reframe structure, each one is a new instruction not to think about the thing the writer wanted you to forget.
The consequences go beyond annoyance. In a 2004 social psychology study examining how people encode negated information, researchers explained why some negations fail more than others.
When a negated phrase has an obvious, commonly inferred alternative, readers mentally replace it. For example, they can substitute “not guilty” for “innocent” or “not cold” for “warm.” Without the alternative, the original concept remains active with a negation tag attached, like a mental sticky note reading “not this.”
That sticky note can fall off quite easily. In the study, participants lost it more than a third of the time for concepts without clear alternatives, remembering the affirmed version instead.
Consider what that means for “This isn’t marketing, it’s a movement.” Marketing has no ready-made substitute for our mind to consider. What readers store is “marketing” with a tag that may or may not survive their scroll to the next post.
Scaling a cognitive problem
The problem is scale. A 2024 study on generative AI by economics and strategy researchers found that when people write with AI assistance, their outputs converge. Individual pieces may be more polished, but the collective pool of writing becomes more similar. AI-assisted texts were found to be roughly 10 per cent more alike than those written by humans alone.
Their study examined creative fiction, but the results have obvious implications for other forms of writing. When a rhetorical formula saturates an entire platform, it stops being one person’s stylistic habit and becomes a default frame through which ideas enter public conversation.
Right now, that frame often starts from a deficit. It emphasises what something fails to be rather than what it offers.
The alternative is straightforward. Say what it is. Say what you built, what you believe, what you offer. It’s a better cognitive strategy.
Readers who encounter “I am a movement builder” store “movement builder.” Readers who encounter “This isn’t marketing” store “marketing” with a sticky note that’s already peeling off.
One formulation gives people something to remember. The other gives them something to forget, and psychology suggests it won’t work.
- is a PhD, Management, Lang School of Business and Economics, University of Guelph
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
