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ZDNET's key takeaways
Workers are using AI to create low-quality "workslop."
Bosses have to pick up hours of slack to fix it, harming careers.
AI ROI is still unclear for most workplaces.
Workers are becoming overly reliant on AI. The result? Lackluster product, now coined "workslop," according to new research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab.
Also: 10 ChatGPT Codex secrets I only learned after 60 hours of pair programming with it
Workslop -- which the researchers defined as "AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task" in an accompanying write-up for Harvard Business Review (HBR) -- has some serious impacts. Forty percent of the 1,150 employees BetterUp and Stanford surveyed reported receiving workslop in the past month. It mostly occurs between peers but is also sent to managers by direct reports.
Employees taking the easy way out of a work assignment isn't new, but the tools they're using to do so are. AI tools, like ChatGPT, Gemini, and various task-specific agents, are fixing code, creating presentation slides, generating text, and summarizing emails or articles for workers. As workers hand over more tasks to AI assistants and do less of the work themselves, they are turning in poorer results that someone, whether it's a peer or a manager, then has to redo or correct themselves.
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