Though companies tout how artificial intelligence will revolutionize the workplace, the incorporation of AI may be reducing productivity as workers create “workslop,” according to new research. This low-effort AI-generated content makes other people’s jobs more difficult and builds resentment among co-workers.
What is workslop?
AI “workslop” is the “new busywork,” said research by Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs. Workslop is defined as “AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task,” said the researchers in a piece for Harvard Business Review. Essentially, “employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable-looking work that ends up creating more work for their co-workers.”
This can appear in different ways, “from bad code to decks with incomplete information or just strangely worded emails,” said CNBC. “It all has the same effect of adding work onto the recipient to make sense of it all.” The problem is substantive. The research found that 40% of the 1,150 surveyed U.S. full-time employees received AI workslop in the last month. It also found that it takes an average of two hours to resolve each workshop incident.
Receiving workslop can be demoralizing. “Instead of freedom, some desk workers find themselves slogging through with low-quality work,” said Insider. “Experienced software engineers are now debugging code, graphic designers are making generative-AI images look like something humans actually want to see and writers are editing the words that large language models spit out for accuracy — then rewriting it to cover up ChatGPT’s telltale signs.”
How does it affect the workplace?
The prevalence of office workslop is an “evolution of ‘cognitive offloading,’” said Futurism. This is the “term that psychologists use to describe outsourcing your thinking to a piece of technology, be it a calculator or a search engine.” Unlike previous iterations of cognitive offloading, “workslop uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being,” said the researchers.
This can build up resentment in the workplace. “If your coworker foists lengthy, useless docs generated by AI onto your desk, it can feel like they’re not pulling their weight or not capable of doing the work themselves,” said Insider.
There is also a “deeper dread that comes from toiling in workslop,” said Allison Morrow in CNN. The current “cultural moment” has the “titans of Corporate America” unable to “stop talking about how the technology is so powerful it’s bound to replace the very people it’s been foisted upon.” Workslop is the “inevitable (and avoidable) result of companies blindly adopting tools that don’t work simply because a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires declared that chatbots were The Next Internet.”
Ultimately, “writing, coding or designing is about communicating ideas to others,” said Insider. There may come a time when people disavow the supposed power of AI. If work is “outsourced to gen AI with little to no human oversight, there may be little value for the human on the other end who has to read it.”
Using AI may create more work for others
