Remember when we were promised that artificial intelligence would liberate us from mundane tasks and supercharge our productivity? Well, congratulations: we’ve entered the era of “workslop,” and spoiler alert, it’s not quite the productivity paradise we were sold.
What Fresh Hell is Workslop?
If you’ve recently opened a report from a colleague and thought, “This looks impressive, but what does it actually say?” Congratulations, you’ve been workslopped.
Researchers from Stanford University and BetterUp Labs recently coined this delightful portmanteau to describe AI-generated work content that looks polished and professional but contains about as much substance as a corporate mission statement. Think of it as the professional equivalent of those AI-generated Instagram posts featuring rabbits on trampolines: technically coherent, visually appealing, utterly bizarre upon closer inspection.
The Harvard Business Review defines workslop as content that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” In other words, it’s the business world’s version of empty calories, looks filling, delivers nothing.
The Numbers Don’t Lie (Unlike Your Colleague’s AI-Written Report)
Here’s where things get interesting. While AI adoption in the workplace has doubled since 2023, and companies with fully AI-led processes nearly doubled last year, a recent MIT Media Lab report found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their AI investments. That’s not a typo. Ninety-five percent.
The workslop problem is more widespread than you might think. According to the Stanford-BetterUp research, 41% of workers have encountered AI-generated output that required significant rework. And here’s the kicker: each instance of workslop costs employees an average of nearly two hours to fix.
Let’s do some napkin math. At $186 per month per affected employee (based on the researchers’ salary calculations), a company with 10,000 employees is hemorrhaging more than $9 million annually on workslop cleanup. That’s a lot of money to spend on what essentially amounts to corporate Mad Libs.
The Emotional Toll: It’s Not Just Your Productivity That’s Suffering
Beyond the financial hit, workslop is creating an interpersonal minefield in offices. When surveyed, 53% of workers said receiving workslop made them feel annoyed, 38% felt confused, and 22% felt outright offended. Perhaps most damaging: half of respondents viewed colleagues who sent workslop as less capable and reliable.
Nothing says “I value our working relationship” quite like copy-pasting an AI response and calling it a day.
One retail director captured the frustration perfectly: “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.”
That’s right, the AI tool meant to save time actually created a productivity matryoshka doll of wasted effort.
The Root of All Evil: “Just Do It”
So how did we get here? Simple: Silicon Valley’s favorite management philosophy, “move fast and break things,” collided with the equally problematic “adopt AI or die” panic.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s advice epitomizes the problem: “Just do it. When things are changing quickly, the companies that have the quickest adoption speed win.” This gospel of speed-over-strategy has led to blanket mandates that essentially force employees to use AI for everything, regardless of whether it makes sense.
The result? Workers mindlessly copy-pasting AI responses into documents because they’ve been told they must use AI, not because it actually helps them do better work. It’s the corporate equivalent of making your employees wear “I’m with Stupid” t-shirts, except the arrow points at everyone.
The Insidious Shift
What makes workslop particularly pernicious is how it redistributes labor. As the Harvard Business Review researchers note, workslop “shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work.”
In essence, one person’s AI shortcut becomes everyone else’s long cut. The cognitive labor doesn’t disappear, it just gets dumped on someone else’s desk, like a game of hot potato where the potato is a vaguely coherent slide deck that somehow needs twelve more rounds of revision.
Breaking Free from the Slop
The good news? This isn’t inevitable. The researchers suggest that rather than mandating blanket AI adoption, organizations should develop thoughtful best practices and recommendations. Revolutionary concept: use AI when it helps, don’t when it doesn’t.
Leaders need to model purposeful AI use themselves and create clear guardrails. Ask questions like: Does this task actually benefit from AI assistance? Am I providing enough context for the output to be useful? Would I send this if I had written it myself?
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you wouldn’t send that report with your name on it after reading it carefully, you definitely shouldn’t send it just because a chatbot wrote it.
The Bottom Line
The workslop epidemic reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about AI tools. They’re not magic productivity wands that transform every task they touch. They’re tools, sometimes useful, sometimes not, and always requiring human judgment to deploy effectively.
Companies are learning an expensive lesson: adopting technology for technology’s sake, especially when driven by FOMO rather than strategy, doesn’t create value. It creates work. Bad work. Work that other people have to fix.
So, the next time you’re tempted to let AI draft that report or memo for you, pause and ask yourself: Am I using this tool to enhance my thinking, or am I outsourcing my thinking entirely? Because if it’s the latter, congratulations – you’re not boosting productivity. You’re just making slop.
Sources
Primary Research:
- Niederhoffer, K., Kellerman, G.R., Lee, A., Liebscher, A., Rapuano, K., & Hancock, J.T. (2025, September 22). “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity.” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity
Additional References:
- Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs joint research on AI-generated workplace content (2025)
- MIT Media Lab report on AI investment returns (2025)
- Accenture. “Reinventing Enterprise Operations” report on AI-led processes (2024)
- Gallup workplace survey on AI adoption rates (2023-2025)