AI "workslop" sabotages productivity, study finds
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Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
AI is supposed to make work easier, but instead it has generated a new problem: "workslop."
Why it matters: The term, coined by researchers in the latest Harvard Business Review, describes low-quality AI-generated content — memos, reports, emails — that's clogging up employees' lives and wasting their time.
What they're saying: Workslop "appears polished but lacks real substance," write researchers from Stanford University who collaborated with BetterUp, a leadership coaching platform.
- "[Y]ou might recall the feeling of confusion after opening such a document, followed by frustration," they write. "You begin to wonder if the sender simply used AI to generate large blocks of text instead of thinking it through."
- "If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped."
By the numbers: In August and September, the researchers surveyed 1,150 U.S. adults who described themselves as desk workers about their experiences with "workslop." They didn't name the term, but merely defined it.
- 40% said they'd encountered this stuff in the last month — slowing down their workday.
- They reported spending an average of 1 hour and 56 minutes dealing with each instance.
Zoom out: Slop carries real costs — looking at the average respondent salary, the researchers estimate workslop incidents costs $186 per month.
- For a large organization, that can add up to more than $9 million a year in lost productivity, per their back-of-the-envelope math.
- When asked how workslop made them feel, more than half of respondents said they were annoyed, 38% were confused and 22% were offended.
The intrigue: Colleagues look down on workslop senders — about half of all those surveyed viewed slop senders as less creative, capable and reliable.
- And yet they're sending it, too. Of those using AI at work, 18% admitted sending AI-generated content that was "unhelpful, low effort or low quality."
The big picture: Workslop is the workplace offshoot of the general run of AI-generated slop most of us see day-to-day — rabbits jumping on trampolines, fast fashion ads featuring Luigi Mangione, weird uncanny images of hands with the wrong number of fingers, and so forth.
- It's also another sign that AI isn't necessarily translating into productivity gains at work.
- A report from MIT out a few months ago found that 95% of business' AI pilot projects fail.
Zoom in: The researchers noticed workslop in their daily lives, as friends, colleagues and families shared frustrating experiences, said Jeffrey Hancock, director of Stanford's Social Media Lab.
- Survey respondents also shared examples — including from health care providers who griped about getting long AI-generated reports from patients that diagnose their health problems using data from Fitbits or Oura rings, without any real medical underpinning.
Yes, but: Well before the advent of AI, employees were generating poorly constructed memos, PowerPoints and emails.
- Researchers told Axios the workers reporting the most slop were in tech, health care and professional services. (Consulting is basically ground zero for the overwrought slide deck.)
The bottom line: You can use AI to make your work better, says Kate Niederhoffer, vice president of BetterUp Labs and one of the researchers.
- But you can also use it to pretend to get 20 tasks done, she says, and just "Trojan horse" a bunch of work to your colleagues.
