Workslop in the wild

AI promised to revolutionize productivity. Instead, many of us are producing low-effort ‘workslop’ — and generating headaches for others

THIS MAY JUST be one newsletter writer’s opinion, but ChatGPT is not a very good writer. It, and all the other large language models (LLMs) out there, are sometimes just okay writers, but nobody is really dazzled by the quality of its outputs.

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Generating passable written material is proving to be one of AI’s lower-value-generating tricks, although for the average white-collar user it has proven to be one of the most appealing. Writing can be quite laborious, after all, so for those for whom writing does not come easily, LLMs appear to be solving a pain point, and thus AI-generated copy is now everywhere.

That contradiction comes at a cost, though, and researchers from Stanford University and BetterUp Labs are suggesting the volume of what they term ‘workslop’ is now actually causing productivity to drop, as workers spend increasing amounts of time correcting, re-writing or re-doing work done with an LLM.

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Workslop, which the research team defines as “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task,” is growing into a larger problem in professional work. “Of 1,150 U.S.-based full-time employees across industries, 40 per cent report having received workslop in the last month,” the researchers found, with those that encounter it estimating that it accounts for 15.4 per cent of work content they interact with.

The researchers also discovered this content was producing more work than the initial task itself. One retail director recalls receiving a piece of AI-generated work product from a coworker upstream and said, “I had to waste more time following up on the information and checking it with my own research. I then had to waste even more time setting up meetings with other supervisors to address the issue. Then I continued to waste my own time having to redo the work myself.”

In a nutshell, though professionals are enamoured with how quickly and passably AI can produce work product, the quality is lacking — and that often becomes someone else’s problem. “The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream,” the authors said. “In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.”

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Workslop is one more voice in a chorus of questions being asked about the viability of AI, one that is growing louder and louder. A few weeks ago, we wrote about an MIT study that found that 95 per cent of all AI pilots had not shown returns, for instance. “The main story seems to be that there is widespread adoption of AI, but that it’s not proving to be that useful, has not resulted in widespread productivity gains, and often ends up creating messes that human beings have to clean up,” wrote Jason Koebler.

“Workslop may feel effortless to create but exacts a toll on the organization,” the Stanford and BetterUp researchers summed up. “Workslop is an excellent example of new collaborative dynamics introduced by AI that can drain productivity rather than enhance it.” Kieran Delamont