AI-Generated 'Workslop' Is Destroying Productivity (hbr.org)
- Reference: 0179490254
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/23/092205/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity
- Source link: https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity
Professional services and technology sectors are disproportionately affected. Workers report that 15.4% of received content qualifies as workslop. The phenomenon occurs primarily between peers at 40%, though 18% flows from direct reports to managers and 16% moves down the hierarchy. Beyond financial costs, workslop damages workplace relationships -- half of recipients view senders as less creative, capable, and reliable, while 42% see them as less trustworthy.
[1] https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity
How about workslop from management? (Score:5, Informative)
> "workslop" -- AI-generated content that appears polished but lacks substance
I regularly receive human-generated content that appears polished but lacks substance, from management, throughout decades of my career.
Wonder why no one did a study on how much money do management workslop wasted.
Re: (Score:3)
Wait, it is possible to receive management content that has substance in it? Why didn't anyone tell me this?
Which companies have management that does not provide slop?
Re: (Score:1)
> Wait, it is possible to receive management content that has substance in it? Why didn't anyone tell me this?
When the engineering managers came from the engineering ranks you can get non-slop content from managers. It's not guarenteed, but it can happen.
Re: (Score:2)
I can't agree more! Maybe we could use AI to reduce slop and not increase it?
IMHO, people use this "padding" or "slop" as an illusion of productivity
Re: (Score:2)
> I can't agree more! Maybe we could use AI to reduce slop and not increase it? IMHO, people use this "padding" or "slop" as an illusion of productivity
Expecting AI to slow the tide of slop is expecting the AI providers to fight themselves. They want to justify their existence, so the creation of "communications" must be filled with the MAXIMUM slop that management teams will allow while still accepting the output. That way the AI companies can justify filtering the slop on the user side by summarizing it into slightly less filthy slop. Gotta generate massive quantities of useless slop, in order to justify slimming down the slop on the other end.
And someho
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What? You mean leveraging off our core competencies and synergize in a cross functional team environment on a go forward basis isn't a crystal clear way to communicate our new strategy? I'm shocked, just shocked.
Human slop (Score:2)
My place of work sends human slop. They are constantly giving us impediments to doing our job while complaining that we should be more productive. Emails every 5 minutes. Teams going off constantly from various different channels we are 'required' too be in. Then you miss something because it was buried in all the crap, people look down on you. So you need to wade through all the crap. Oh yes and now people are just seeing up websites for their team and expecting you to go out of your way to check out
Re: (Score:2)
Depending on your manager, it's intentional. For managers, personal power is a result of having more people below you on the organization tree. The most logical way to respond to this incentive is to hire more people below you. And if people are working slowly, then it's a justification to hire more people.
Not all managers do this, but the incentive exists, and managers who do it tend to gain power faster than those who don't.
So, because incentives are misaligned, evolutionary pressure exists in corpora
I have been occasionally asked (Score:2)
To write documentation that I know nobody is ever going to read or use. I have to admit if I had had AI back then I absolutely would have used it to write that nonsense.
Also and this is somewhat terrifying but I have encountered people incapable of reading at the director level. I don't mean that as an insult I mean literally they are functionally illiterate. I figured it out when I had one of them and I kept emailing a basic explanation of something to them and they didn't understand but the moments I
AI is a study in contrast (Score:2)
Real progress is being made in creating useful tools that deliver real value. I find perplexity and chat GPT to be very useful for a limited number of tasks. Future AI may deliver tools that help us solve previously intractable problems.
Unfortunately, a lot of crap is being produced. Image generators, music generators, vibe coding tools, robot friends, robot therapists, corporate email generators and more are wasting time and money and making everything worse.
This seems to be true of every new tech. Some us
Re: (Score:2)
> Real progress is being made in creating useful tools that deliver real value.
Please elaborate and cite research. Because, for example for coding, AI decreases productivity by an average of 20%, while most users mistakenly think they have a productivity increase.
As expected (Score:2)
This is in no way unexpected and adds to the overall performance decreases caused by "AI" observable from other effects. For example, for coding productivity decreases on average by 20%, not counting cost from lower code quality, while typical users mistakenly believe to have higher productivity.
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There is a way to us DNN/LLM "AI"s correctly; use them like a search engine.
Ask a hyper specific question, and scrutinize the answer given thoroughly.
In the same way that crowdsourced intelligence made google a useful tool for search, and social media created a great pool of questions and answers for that search to run over, DNN's are just an extension of search.
They are a wonderful improvement in the areas of (1) parsing the query and (2) re-jiggering the resultant hits.
(1) They can decode the user's quest
Not a problem. (Score:3)
Nothing that can't be solved by dumping another few trillion borrowed dollars to generate even better "AI" slop.