It’s the start of a brand-new week. Fresh to-do lists, fresh coffee, and—if you’re lucky—fresh motivation.
But right on cue, a new study just dropped a reality check every workplace should pay attention to: artificial intelligence, the very tool we’ve been sold as a productivity booster, might actually be quietly sabotaging us.
Picture this: you’ve got that half-full coffee mug, the faint dread of unread emails, and a small hope that today will be smooth. Then you open your inbox and boom—a flood of neatly formatted reports, all polished, all professional… and all absolutely useless.
Welcome to the world of AI workslop.
It’s the kind of content that looks productive, but once you actually read it, you realize it’s just fluff dressed up as progress.
So, where exactly did this come from?
Researchers at BetterUp Labs, alongside Stanford’s Social Media Lab, coined the term to describe content that looks polished but is simply empty at its core.
Think of it like a donut made entirely of air. Sure, it has the shape—but none of the substance. We're talking:
An AI-generated report that’s technically correct but says absolutely nothing new.
A piece of marketing copy so bland it could be describing anything.
That’s workslop.
Here's the sneaky part: because it looks professional, people treat it like real work. However, it masquerades as productivity while quietly draining time, energy, and focus.
And it's not just a minor nuisance. Workslop ripples across the workplace in three big ways:
It increases workload. Employees spend extra hours double-checking, rewriting, or completely redoing AI drafts.
It creates gaps. A document may look “done,” but miss the insights that actually matter.
It erodes trust. Maybe the most damaging effect—when teammates keep sending half-baked AI drafts, you start doubting not just the tech, but the people using it.
No wonder surveys show that 40% of 1,150 full-time U.S. employees ran into AI workslop just last month.
The message is clear: AI isn’t a shortcut to success if it’s just churning out junk.
And as this new week begins, here’s the reminder we all need: how we use these tools matters far more than whether we use them.
The solutions aren’t flashy, but they’re essential:
Leaders must set guardrails, employees need real AI literacy, and companies must treat AI as an assistant — not a replacement for human judgment.
So here’s your Monday thought: AI won’t save your week for you. In fact, left unchecked, it might make it messier. But used wisely — with clear expectations and smart oversight — it can help us do more with less frustration.
The bottom line? Don’t let workslop steal your week before it even begins.
If this hits close to home, you can dig deeper on it here.
