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ZDNET's key takeaways
- Workers are using AI to create low-quality "workslop."
- Bosses have to pick up hours of slack to fix it, harming careers.
- AI ROI is still unclear for most workplaces.
Workers are becoming overly reliant on AI. The result? Lackluster product, now coined "workslop," according to new research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab.
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Workslop -- which the researchers defined as "AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task" in an accompanying write-up for Harvard Business Review (HBR) -- has some serious impacts. Forty percent of the 1,150 employees BetterUp and Stanford surveyed reported receiving workslop in the past month. It mostly occurs between peers but is also sent to managers by direct reports.
Employees taking the easy way out of a work assignment isn't new, but the tools they're using to do so are. AI tools, like ChatGPT, Gemini, and various task-specific agents, are fixing code, creating presentation slides, generating text, and summarizing emails or articles for workers. As workers hand over more tasks to AI assistants and do less of the work themselves, they are turning in poorer results that someone, whether it's a peer or a manager, then has to redo or correct themselves.
Who's making workslop?
Workslop exists across industries but disproportionately impacts professional services and technology, the researchers found.
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"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. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver," the researchers wrote in HBR.
Workslop signifies more than a simple over-reliance on technology to accomplish tasks. Not only are workers automating their reponsibilities to their detriment, but their AI use results in their coworker or superior needing to clean up the sloppy mess they've created.
"Workslop uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being," the authors wrote.
Why it matters
Worksloppy employees tend to be viewed more negatively by their peers and managers, according to the research: Half of respondents say they view workers who turn in workslop as less creative, reliable, and capable.
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The term also highlights a growing contradiction between AI's promises of productivity and the reality it's creating. Some reports show that AI is improving productivity, often in coding, while others depict a more complicated story.
Despite chatter from AI startups and tech giants that the technology will supercharge productivity, AI's ROI has yet to be fully realized. Just 5% of companies have seen a return on investment in the technology yet, according to a recent MIT report.
In fact, the BetterUp and Stanford survey, which is ongoing, found that workslop added an hour and 56 minutes of work onto the workslop receiver.
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"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," one survey respondent said.
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