I loved the short on the Harvard Business Review YouTube channel “AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity.”

We are getting to the point where we can validate or disprove the hype of AI boosting productivity and work quality in the workplace. The data coming in could be interpreted as “it’s complicated.” 

“Many companies report no measurable ROI on their AI investments,” says Jeffrey T. Hancock, Professor of Communication at Stanford University. One reason he cites is “workslop,” which is defined as low-quality AI content that creates extra work. Someone has to make sense of it and clean it up – and that takes time, which tanks productivity. They even estimated the financial cost of cleaning up workslop.

Have you ever had someone send you word salad that was obviously generated by AI and not sense-checked by the human who sent it? I think we all have at this point.

But workslop could also look good and read pretty well, but just be a remix and not terribly helpful in moving a project forward. 

According to the short, a Stanford and BetterUp survey of 1,150 employees found:

  • 40% received workslop in the past month
  • About 15% of workplace content is workslop
  • It mostly comes from peers, but also managers and direct reports 

When professionals receive workslop from a peer or other person, it negatively affects the sender’s credibility, creativity, and intelligence in the eyes of the person who received it. Sending workslop weakens culture and people will not want to collaborate with someone who sends it.

In short, your professional reputation is negatively impacted by sending workslop and it can take time to clean that up.

So, the question is how do we stop workslop? The first suggestion in the short is an excellent one: don’t mandate using AI for everything. Tell your employees to use it where it is helpful and not to use it where it is not. 

From what I am hearing from my clients, that is unlikely to happen. Many companies have drunk the AI Kool-Aid and are claiming to be “AI first” organizations (nobody really knows what that means), assuming AI will give them a competitive advantage.

We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out. My sense is there will be a lot of going back to the drawing board to do the strategic planning they should have done before adding AI into everything. 

Photo by Sandie Clarke on Unsplash