On the list of “things that annoy me about AI”, trying to upsell AI features as part of a service is close to the top. I’ve recently noticed that my LinkedIn feed has been shoving an AI icon and related “coaching prompts” into my feed, and my solution of hiding every post that had the icons on them wasn’t actually filtering the system the way that I wanted. Today I spent a few minutes learning how to write a custom filter for AdBlocker Ultimate, one of the ad blockers that I use, to figure out how to filter out this new AI feature. Because it’s ultimately not even the AI itself – clicking on any of the icons is just an upsell for LinkedIn premium to unlock the feature.

If you just want the filter:

linkedin.com##[data-test-icon*="signal-ai-small"]
linkedin.com##.artdeco-button[aria-label*="Get key takeaways from this post"]
linkedin.com##.coach-shared-hscroll-bar__multi-container

I actually think that this should work with just the bottom two lines (the first hid the icons, but not the button itself) but I’m too lazy to go change my filter and refresh a page, so you can try it out with the two lines instead if you so choose.

How it works:

The way that ad blockers work is by matching elements on the page against a known set of things that we don’t want to see. The syntax above checks a particular website (linkedin.com) against a CSS rule filter, and if it’s a match, it changes it to become invisible.

I wouldn’t generally start with filtering on an aria-label CSS property, but in inspecting the webpage code, I couldn’t successfully use any other property that would hide the AI content, but not other elements on the page. My first attempts at filtering out the content using the built-in selection tool hid the box at the top of the page that lets you post content to LinkedIn, which isn’t the biggest deal for me, honestly. But, I decided to go with a more proper approach because L E A R N I N G.

Applying the fix:

1. Copy the lines above (or just the bottom two) and open up the ‘Settings’ in the AdBlocker Ultimate add-on menu.
2. Click the ‘Custom Rules’ tab
3. Paste the lines in at the bottom of the rule list
4. Enjoy (?) LinkedIn without the constant little reminders that you are the product until you succumb to Microsoft’s copilot obsession

Takeaway:

We don’t need to accept AI everywhere! Defend yourself! I won’t go down without a fight!

Bonus:
You can add the following two lines to also get rid of “collaborative articles”!

linkedin.com##.update-components-header--with-divider
linkedin.com##.feed-shared-conversations__navigation-context