AI slop isn’t limited to cringey cat videos on Facebook anymore; it has made its way into the workplace.
The Harvard Business Review recently coined a term for low-quality, AI-generated work documents—workslop. The respected business publication argues that this growing pile of phoned-in memos and reports is one reason many companies are seeing little return on their AI investments.
The report lands as the AI industry keeps booming. The U.N. recently projected the global AI market will rocket from $189 billion in 2023 to a staggering $4.8 trillion by 2033. In the U.S., the share of employees who say they use AI at least a few times a year has nearly doubled from 21% to 40%, according to Gallup. And Accenture reported that the number of companies running fully AI-driven processes nearly doubled in the past year.
But as offices everywhere are scrambling to plug AI tools into their workflows so they don’t get left behind, very few are seeing their efforts actually pay off.
Just last month, an MIT Media Lab study found that fewer than one in ten AI pilot projects delivered real revenue gains and warned that “95 percent of organizations are getting zero return” on their AI bets. Based on 150 executive interviews, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments, the report triggered a dip in AI stocks.
Now, researchers from Harvard Business Review’s BetterUp Labs, working with the Stanford Social Media Lab, are pointing to workslop as a possible culprit behind those disappointing results.
“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,” the report’s authors wrote.
What is workslop exactly?
The Harvard Business Review defines workslop as, “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”
This can look like polished presentation slides, eloquent report summaries, and even decent
code, but on closer inspection, the work can be missing key context and is ultimately unhelpful.
According to the researchers’ ongoing survey, the problem is widespread. Of 1,150 U.S.–based full-time employees across industries, 40% said they had received workslop in the past month.
How workslop hurts companies and workers
The proliferation of workslop could cost companies time, money, and even trust among workers.
Surveyed workers reported spending an average of one hour and 56 minutes per incident dealing with low-quality AI outputs. Researchers calculated that, based on respondents’ salaries, workslop carries an invisible cost of around $186 per month. For companies with thousands of employees, that can translate into millions of dollars in lost productivity each year.
Workslop also takes a social and emotional toll in the office. When asked, 53% of participants said receiving workslop made them feel annoyed, 38% confused, and 22% offended. Half of the respondents also reported viewing colleagues who sent workslop as less capable and reliable.
How to avoid workslop
To steer clear of “workslop,” researchers suggested managers need to set clear guardrails and model thoughtful and purposeful use of AI themselves. Blanket “AI everywhere all the time” mandates just lead to workers mindlessly copying and pasting AI responses into documents.
Instead, organizations should develop best practices and recommendations regarding how generative AI can truly add value and help achieve company goals.