Beware coworkers who produce AI-generated ‘workslop’

Researchers at consulting firm BetterUp Labs, in collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, have coined a new term to describe low-quality, AI-generated work: “workslop.”

As defined in an article published this week in the Harvard Business Review, workslop is “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”

BetterUp Labs researchers suggest that workslop could be one explanation for the 95% of organizations that have tried AI but report seeing zero return on that investment. Workslop, they write, can be “unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context,” which just creates more work for everyone else.

“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,” they write.

The researchers also conducted an ongoing survey of 1,150 full-time, U.S.-based employees, with 40% of respondents saying they’d received workslop in the past month.

To avoid this, the researchers say workplace leaders must “model thoughtful AI use that has purpose and intention” and “set clear guardrails for your teams around norms and acceptable use.”