"The official description of workslop, per researchers from Stanford's Social Media Lab and BetterUp, an online coaching platform, is "AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task." But, let's be honest, most office workers won't need a definition. We've all encountered examples of workslop in the wild. It's the memo jammed with stuffy words like "underscore" and "commendable" that leaves you scratching your head, or the report littered with em-dashes that, upon a close read, feels hollow."
"It's one thing to get a clumsy AI-created marketing email or solicitation from a vendor; it's another to get one from your colleague or boss. We used to complain about meetings that could have been an email; now we receive confusing workslop emails that require meetings to be decoded. Managers who shared workslop horror stories with the Stanford and BetterUp team also described redoing a direct report's project or sending it back for heavy revisions."
"After surveying full-time employees at 1,150 companies, the researchers found that workslop is flowing in all directions inside firms. Mostly it spreads laterally between peers, but managers are also sending slop to their reports, and employees are filing it to their bosses. In total, 40% of respondents said they had received a specimen they'd define as workslop in the past month from a colleague."
Workslop is AI-generated work content that appears polished but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance tasks. Workslop often takes the form of hollow memos, jargon-filled reports, or confusing emails that require meetings to decode. Workslop flows throughout organizations: laterally among peers, from managers to reports, and from employees to bosses. Surveys of full-time employees across many companies show substantial prevalence, with many workers receiving workslop regularly. Workslop prompts rework, heavy revisions, and additional meetings, undermining productivity even as companies invest in AI tools intended to increase efficiency.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]