In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, researchers at consulting firm Betterup Labs have coined a new term to describe the low-quality, AI-generated work “Workslop.”
As defined in an article published this week in Harvard Business Review, Workslop is “AI-generated work content that pretends to be a good job, but has no substance that will move a particular task meaningfully forward.
Researchers at Betterup Labs suggest that Workslop could be one explanation for 95% of organizations who have tried AI but report zero returns on their investments. The workslot they write about could be “an important context that is useless, incomplete, or missing.”
“The insidious effect of workslots is to shift the burden of work downstream and require the recipient to interpret, modify or redo the work,” they write.
The researchers also conducted an ongoing survey of 1,150 full-time, US-based employees, with 40% of respondents receiving their worklop last month.
To avoid this, researchers say workplace leaders must “model thoughtful AI use with purpose and intention,” and “set clear guardrails for teams on norms and acceptable use.”