from the slop-for-you-slop-for-me-slop-for-everyone dept.
They finally came up with a word for it. "Workslop". To much AI usage among (co-)workers is leading to "workslop". Where there is to much AI production that doesn't turn out to be very valuable or productive. It looks fine at a first glance but has produced nothing of value or solved any problems. It just looks fine. All shiny surface, but nothing actual.
workslop is "AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task."
AI promised to revolutionize productivity. Instead, 'workslop' is a giant time suck and the scourge of the 21st century office, Stanford warns
A benefits manager said of one AI-sourced document a colleague sent her, "It was annoying and frustrating to waste time trying to sort out something that should have been very straightforward."
So while companies may be spending hundreds of millions on AI software to create efficiencies and boost productivity, and encouraging employees to use it liberally, they may also be injecting friction into their operations.
The researchers say that "lazy" AI-generated work is not only slowing people down, it's also leading to employees losing respect for each other. After receiving workslop, staffers said they saw the peers behind it as less creative and less trustworthy.
"The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work," they write.
So shit literally flows downwards then?
https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/27/beware-coworkers-who-produce-ai-generated-workslop/
https://fortune.com/2025/09/23/ai-workslop-workshop-workplace-communication/
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/26/business/ai-workslop-nightcap
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jb on Wednesday October 01 2025, @06:32AM (6 children)
Nonsense. The correct response to receiving (in a work context) anything that's clearly been written by an LLM is to print it out, grab a big red pen and clearly write "TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE; REDO URGENT; THIS TIME DO IT YOURSELF" covering the whole front page, then drop it on the originator's desk just after he or she has left for lunch. Pretty much guaranteed to ensure no repeats (from anyone in the office, not just the first offender).
If we accept that sort of slop from others, then we become part of the problem.
If your accountant sent you a "quarterly report" that was produced by a random number generator, he wouldn't stay your accountant for very long! There's no more reason to accept wrong prose than there is to accept wrong figures.
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Wednesday October 01 2025, @12:12PM
Its a punch down technology.
The VP of HR is permitted, even encouraged, to send a fifteen page email "that everyone has to sit down and read" that was LLM generated slop along the lines of "proactively leveraging our synergies by editing TPS report headers"
Mere front line employees are not allowed to punch upward using AI.
This is an interesting financial problem for AI companies because they seem to be assuming they'll sell slop to all workers (or replace workers) not be a punishment tool solely purchased for management.
(Score: 4, Funny) by SomeGuy on Wednesday October 01 2025, @12:17PM
The key here is it should not be accepted.
But look at what employees are actually measured on....
Bob's job is to crank out reports all day. He creates 50 reports a day, his cow-orker Statjarrajab cranks out 70 reports a day. Guess who gets higher performance ratings, even when Bobs reports are much higher quality. Well, now comes along skibidi slop AI and Bob can crank out over 9000 reports a day.
His manager, Bozo, is cumming in his clown pants.
The HR director, Ms. Ou T. Sourcer is all fine with that as long as everyone works for peanuts.
Nuke the planet from orbit, just to be sure.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 01 2025, @06:04PM (3 children)
That, however, implies that the audience actually reads and understands the document enough to identify it as LLM slop. If, by contrast, the boss simply glances at it, confirms that they indeed received a TPS report from employee #38592 by the expected deadline, and goes back to playing office politics, then the employee just saved themselves an enormous amount of time instead of putting significant effort into what was in fact a completely pointless task.
Of course, they could have accomplished the same goal by having a reasonable-looking page 1, and replacing the rest with "lorem ipsum ...", but that's a bit riskier.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday October 01 2025, @06:35PM (1 child)
If, by contrast, the boss simply glances at it, confirms that they indeed received a TPS report from employee #38592 by the expected deadline, and goes back to playing office politics, then the employee just saved themselves an enormous amount of time instead of putting significant effort into what was in fact a completely pointless task.
That sure sounds productive! [do I need a sarcasm tag? Poe's Law and all]
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 01 2025, @06:54PM
Oh yes, a very effective office environment that in no way is the result of cancerous management reaching Stage 3 or 4 where it starts to impact the more critical organs of the entire firm.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday October 02 2025, @01:02PM
The thing about TPS reports is that there really OUGHT to be someone who cares about your testing and software quality. And replacing that with AI is a real bad sign
I think anyone who has worked in software has been in at least one organization that cares about "caring about testing" rather than caring about testing. And faking your test results with AI will go unnoticed for years, until a software defect suddenly costs millions.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 01 2025, @06:48AM
So how is the Microsoft + Copilot + github thing going?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1krttqo/my_new_hobby_watching_ai_slowly_drive_microsoft/ [reddit.com]
Are things getting better?
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pulls [github.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday October 01 2025, @11:32AM
One of the funniest possible attacks on LLMs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver [wikipedia.org]
Remember, LLM is unable to detect such things if you implement the situation in a problem domain rather than as a trivial algorithm.
The kinder you are, the easier it is for wicked people to morally coerce you.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday October 01 2025, @12:21PM
Everything old is new again
In the old days, early boomer years, people would hunt -n- peck on a typewriter to generate memos that were mimeographed. Figure it took a four hour work shift to author, reproduce, and distribute a memo by hanging it up all over the office or stuffing in the mailroom mailboxes. Some were worth the time, others were not. Lets be honest most were not worth the time but it keeps people busy during downtimes...
Enter 1980s desktop publishing. Now you can make a similar or better quality memo on the laser printer in less than an hour.
Sure, it costs a lot of money, up front and in supplies. But desktop publishing should boost productivity by 4x. The problem was memos were often/usually not productive and generating 4x as many was strongly negatively productive.
Even worse, people found ways to avoid "real work" by generating ever more elaborate memos. The software has 175 different fonts, better use all of them in each memo to emphasize the importance of each section (read: avoid real work). Oh the new printer has color, better select 15 different colors for the printed memo. Oh we can include clip art from a library of 10000 images? Thats more fun than doing actual work.
AI is really no different. An employee could do real work, or just have fun playing with prompts. Employees are going to do the latter especially if they have a metric goal of using AI to generate X amount of work, and its useless for real work, so its safer to use AI for filler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by YeaWhatevs on Wednesday October 01 2025, @04:55PM
Told ya, world. Quantity is no substitute for quality, especially for code. As I watch this, the nvidia ceo says ai will change every job. Yes I guess when you're wading through trash all day looking for what's good instead of what you did before that counts. Not better, but different.
(Score: 2) by r_a_trip on Friday October 03 2025, @01:05AM
Well, upon receiving the suspected slop, copy it and feed it back into the AI and ask for a summary of 1 DIN A4 or less. You now can read the 20 page slop in about 5 to 10 minutes.