ARTICLE AD BOX
"In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as 'AI slop.' In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as 'workslop.' We define workslop as AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.
"Here’s how this happens. As AI tools become more accessible, workers are increasingly able to quickly produce polished output: well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code. But while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver. [Just as over-use of acronyms will — Ed.]
"If you have ever experienced this, you might recall the feeling of confusion after opening such a document, followed by frustration—'Wait, what is this exactly?'—before 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."
~ Kate Niederhoffer, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Angela Lee, Alex Liebscher, Kristina Rapuano & Jeffrey T. Hancock from their study summary: 'AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity' [hat tip Gary Marcus]
English (US) ·