AI workslop is muddying the American workplace

Though companies boast about how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the workplace, the incorporation of AI is actually reducing productivity as workers create “workslop,” according to new research. This low-effort AI-generated content is making other people’s jobs more difficult and building resentment among co-workers.

What’s workslop?

AI workslop is the “new busywork,” said a study by Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs. It’s defined as “AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task,” said the researchers at Harvard Business Review. Essentially, employees are “using AI tools to create low-effort, passable-looking work that ends up creating more work for their co-workers.”

This can appear in different ways, from “bad code to decks with incomplete information or just strangely worded emails,” said CNBC. “It all has the same effect of adding work onto the recipient to make sense of it all.”

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The problem is substantive. Of the 1,150 U.S. full-time employees surveyed, 40% received AI workslop in the last month. And it takes an average of two hours to resolve each workslop incident.

Receiving workslop can be demoralizing, too. “Instead of freedom, some desk workers find themselves slogging through with low-quality work,” said Insider. “Experienced software engineers are now debugging code, graphic designers are making generative-AI images look like something humans actually want to see and writers are editing the words that large language models spit out for accuracy, then rewriting it to cover up ChatGPT’s telltale signs.”

How does it affect the workplace?

The prevalence of workslop is an “evolution of ‘cognitive offloading,’” said Futurism. This is the term that “psychologists use to describe outsourcing your thinking to a piece of technology, be it a calculator or a search engine.” Unlike previous iterations of cognitive offloading, workslop “uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being,” said the researchers.

This can build up resentment in the workplace. If your coworker “foists lengthy, useless docs generated by AI onto your desk, it can feel like they are not pulling their weight or are not capable of doing the work themselves,” said Insider.

There’s also a “deeper dread that comes from toiling in workslop,” said CNN. The current “cultural moment" has the “titans of Corporate America" unable to “stop talking about how the technology is so powerful it’s bound to replace the very people it has been foisted upon.” Workslop is the “inevitable (and avoidable) result of companies blindly adopting tools that don’t work simply because a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires declared that chatbots were the next internet.”

Ultimately, “writing, coding or designing is about communicating ideas to others,” said Insider. There may come a time when people disavow the supposed power of AI. If work is “outsourced to gen AI with little to no human oversight, there may be little value for the human on the other end who has to read it.”