Workslop: Tackle AI’s Productivity Problem

A new study, and a newly-coined term you’re likely to hear a lot about, brings to light a productivity challenge created by AI.

Employees are using AI to produce passable but low-quality work that often requires coworkers to spend extra time reviewing and improving it, according to a study conducted by Harvard Business Review and Stanford Social Media Lab. Workslop is defined as “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”

Chances are if you’ve received work product that looked professional but lacked depth and left you confused, workslop could be to blame. 40% of employees reported receiving workslop within the last month, according to the study. Even worse for employers, survey respondents reported spending an average of close to 2 hours cleaning up each instance of workslop. The study describes this phenomenon as an “interpersonal workslop tax.” When a team member uses AI to generate workslop, AI is not actually completing the assignment; instead, the work is shifting to colleagues tasked with deciphering, editing, and even redoing the work.

The study points out an interesting difference in how employees leverage AI, noting that “while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand.” Our takeaway: use AI to refine existing work product, not as a substitute for producing the work.

A recent piece in Forbes offers five tips to avoid producing AI workslop: start small, set measurable goals, integrate AI gradually, monitor and refine, and keep a human touch. For your team, this could include using AI to draft an outline instead of an entire report, monitoring whether AI saves time without shifting work to other team members, or refining prompts when output quality starts to decline.

If you’re an employer concerned with workslop, visit with inVeritas to learn how we can help you establish clear AI guidelines and policies for your organization.