The $9 Million Problem: How AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Costing Companies
AI slop, or content generated by AI that looks good but lacks substance, has officially entered the workplace.
This workslop “creates the illusion of progress” but is largely meaningless, which has huge financial and time-related consequences for the workplace, according to a new study from BetterUp and the Stanford Social Media Lab.
According to the study, about 40% of workers have received workslop in the last month.
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Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, told CNBC that there are several telltale signs of work slop, including purple prose, odd word choice, and incomplete information.
Ultimately, he says, workslop lacks the necessary substance to be useful. Not only does it prevent a given task or project from moving forward, it also requires others to come in and “do the real thinking and clean up.”
As a result, AI-generated workslop has real consequences for companies. On average, it takes employees two hours to clean up a workslop-created mess, costing valuable time that could be spent on other projects, the study found.
Then, there’s the financial cost. The study estimates that workslop causes businesses $186 per month, per employee, or $9 million per year for a 10,000-person company.
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On top of all of that, workslop tends to erode trust and camaraderie in the workplace.
Kate Niederhoffer, vice president of BetterUp’s research labs, says she’s experienced these feelings herself when she’s received workslop on the job.
“Why did they do this?” she told CNBC. “Can they not complete the job themselves? I don’t trust them. I don’t want to work with them again.” For Niederhoffer, the end result was “confusion, annoyance, wasted effort, and then some serious layers of judgment.”
She’s not alone in those feelings, either. An unnamed project manager who participated in the study described their experiences with workslop this way:
“Receiving this poor quality work created a huge time waste and inconvenience for me. Since it was provided by my supervisor, I felt uncomfortable confronting her about its poor quality and requesting she redo it. So instead, I had to take on effort to do something that should have been her responsibility, which got in the way of my other ongoing projects.”
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According to the researchers, it’s up to companies that elect to use AI in the office to establish guardrails against workslop.
Hancock told CNBC that businesses need an organized, well-communicated approach to using AI. Individual teams also need to have open communication about when and where they’re using it, regularly evaluating whether or not certain applications of these tools are still meeting their needs.
Niederhoffer says those in leadership positions should develop a “pilot mindset” when it comes to AI use while still focusing on human agency.
Having high levels of agency over AI use in the workplace can be “incredible,” Niederhoffer told CNBC. “But it’s in stark contrast to this really copy-and-paste mode, where you just let the tool do all the work for you, and you forget to let it augment your human competencies,” she said.
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