POV

Are you creating ‘workslop’?

By: Lavana Pauk

There’s a term for something you’ve probably felt but couldn’t quite name. Researchers at Stanford and BetterUp are calling it “workslop”: AI-generated work that looks finished but isn’t. It’s dense with detail and short on an actual point. And it’s more common than you’d think.

40% of workers say they’ve received workslop in the last month, and people estimate about 15% of what lands in their inbox qualifies.

That’s not a fringe problem. That’s a Tuesday.

The cost isn’t just time, though there’s plenty of that too, nearly two hours of rework for every instance. But the bigger cost is quieter. Recipients report feeling annoyed, confused, sometimes outright offended. And roughly half say it changes how they see the person who sent it. Less creative, less capable and less reliable. That’s a real price for something that was supposed to save time.

The Trap
Here’s the part worth sitting with. Workslop doesn’t feel like cutting corners to the person sending it. It feels thorough.

That right there is the trap. A forty-page research dump feels like more effort than a two-line point of view, even when the two lines are the only part that actually required thinking.

The job was never “generate everything you could possibly say.” The job was deciding what to say, what matters, what doesn’t, and what the other person needs to hear. That’s the part AI can’t do for you. It never could. It just makes it a lot easier to skip.

It’s how a point of view becomes a transcript. How a decision becomes a research dump. Somewhere along the way, the thinking part got outsourced, and everyone downstream inherited a very well formatted homework assignment nobody signed up to grade.

Depth and volume aren’t the same thing.

AI is very good at producing one while looking like the other. Useful and thorough aren’t the same thing either. One took judgment. The other just took time. So, tread carefully here, because the line isn’t always obvious. Before you hit send ask yourself: could you say it in one paragraph? One sentence? If so, send that instead. If you can’t yet, that’s fine too. It just means you’re not done thinking yet.