Study finds that AI ‘workslop’ is affecting productivity – The American Bazaar
People have been increasingly using artificial intelligence for work, with companies integrating it into their systems and often encouraging their use. This has been intended to boost productivity, however, that doesn’t always work so well. Researchers from the Harvard Business Review attribute this to “workslop” — a term they coined.
Workslop refers to “low-quality AI-generated content, like memos, reports, and emails that’s clogging up employees’ lives and wasting their time.”
According to Harvard Business Review, while workers are following mandates to use AI, few are seeing real value come out of it. The number of companies with fully AI-led processes nearly doubled last year, while AI use has likewise doubled at work since 2023. Yet a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies.
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“In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as ‘AI slop.’ In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as ‘workslop.’ We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task,” the report says.
The report states that while access to AI tools has made it easier to produce polished output, some of them use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. This ends up transferring the burden of polishing, reinterpreting or editing the work to the sender.
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The researchers surveyed 1,150 U.S. adults who described themselves as desk workers about their experiences with “workslop,” and found that 40% said they’d encountered this stuff in the last month, slowing down their work. They reported spending an average of an hour and 56 minutes dealing with each instance.
This “workslop” carries real costs, with the researchers estimating workslop incidents costs $186 per month. For a large organization, that can add up to more than $9 million a year.
Workslop has also been found to take an emotional and social toll on workers. When asked, 53% of participants said receiving workslop made them feel annoyed, 38% confused, and 22% offended. Half of the respondents also reported viewing colleagues who sent workslop as less capable and reliable.
The researchers have suggested managers set guardrails for AI use to avoid this slop. Blanket mandates to use AI all the time just lead to workers mindlessly copying and pasting AI responses into documents. Instead, organizations should develop best practices and recommendations for the use of this technology.
Nileena Sunil is a Reporter for the American Bazaar. A postgraduate in English Literature from Christ University, Bengaluru, she has previously worked as an instructional designer and a copywriter before switching fields.
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