AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
Let’s be considerate about how we use GenAI to write emails, articles, or blog posts. When I first started, it was fun: Wow, I can crank out a 750-word essay in minutes! But that’s when you risk outsourcing the thinking. The result? What Stanford researchers call “workslop”: lots of words, not much value.
Approximately half of the people we surveyed viewed colleagues who sent workslop as less creative, capable, and reliable than they did before receiving the output. Forty-two percent saw them as less trustworthy, and 37% saw that colleague as less intelligent.
For this post, I didn’t just ask GenAI to write it; we discussed ideas, and I shaped the thinking and co-wrote the text. If you’re generating 10-page documents that someone else has to decipher, you’re just moving the thinking downstream.
AI should help you sharpen ideas, not dump text for others to untangle.