Workers are irritating colleagues with useless workslop

Microsoft just released a suite of AI tools for its Office products for“vibe-working” through your next Word document or Excel spreadsheet.  While certainly don’t want to dissuade anyone from vibing, researchers are sounding the alarm about “workslop," per Harvard Business Review.

As defined by BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab, workshop is “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”

What’s happening?

AI tools now let workers generate and refine writing, slideshows, images, reports, summaries, code, and more. Sometimes, that’s a helpful productivity boost. Sometimes, it results in nonsensical garbage someone else has to fix.

Per the researchers’ ongoing survey of US-based full-time workers:

• Forty percent have been “workshopped” in the last month.
• Those workers estimate workslop accounts for 15.4% of the content they receive. Most (40%) is sent between peers, but 18% is sent to managers and 16% comes from higher-ups.
• Each instance takes an average of ~2 hours to deal with, at an estimated cost of $186 per month based on respondents’ self-reported salary. That’s $9m+ per year in lost productivity. 

Bad vibes

Slop creates an unpleasant environment for the “sloppees,” if you will, who may feel like the sloppers are less capable or just slacking off, offloading tasks first to a robot and then to them. 

One respondent told researchers that a workslop email was so confusing, the company had to gather everyone just to “repeat the information in a clear and concise way.”

Another had to waste time fact-checking slop and setting up a meeting to address it before ultimately redoing the work themselves. 

What’s the lesson here? 

We’re bombarded with cautionary tales and research regarding rapid AI adoption, including: 

• An MIT report that found 95% of companies that integrated AI saw no significant revenue growth.
• Another report that found that AI slows software developers down by 19% due to time spent prompting AI and reviewing work.
• About faces from companies including Taco Bella and Klarna that attempted to introduce AI — or replace humans with it — only to realize it wasn’t working as planned. 

Each suggests that while AI is a promising new tool, it’s also a nascent technology.

Moving too quickly or relying on it too much creates extra work and frustration, whether you’re trying to order a Crunchwrap Supreme or figure out what the heck your coworker’s meandering slideshow is about.