I know you didn't write this

I know you didn't write this

I received a link from a co-worker with the accompanying note:

I put together a plan for the project, take a look.

Taking a quick scan through the linked document I’m pleased to see that there’s some substance to it. And look, there are tables and step-by-step instructions. At the bottom there are risks and potential mitigations. They have definitely put together a plan and it’s definitely in this document.

Later, I poured another cup of coffee and actually read the document and something twigged a part of my brain. Suspicions aroused, I clicked on the “Document History” button in the top right and saw a clean history of empty document – and then wham – fully-formed plan, as if it had just spilled out of someone’s brain, straight onto the screen, ready to share.

So it’s definitely AI. I felt betrayed and a little foolish. But why? If this LLM has slurped up the entirety of human written output, shouldn’t this plan be better than what one person could ever dream up? Perhaps that’s exactly the thought process they had when they turned to their LLM of choice.

I recall looking back at the note to double, triple check that they didn’t call out the use of AI. If this was their best attempt then to save face I’m going to have to write the plan myself.

Regardless of their intent I realised something subtle had happened. Any time saved by (their) AI prompting gets consumed by verification overhead, the work just gets passed along to someone else – in this case me.

Have you been the victim of AI workslop?

A recent, well-covered article in Harvard Business Review explores this new category of newly-coined “workslop” – the process of relying on AI for the creation of working materials. The study provides extensive examples of cases where people have reached for AI with the direct outcome of greatly increasing the amount of collective work that’s required.

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