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A teammate sent me a one-page summary of our team’s Q1 results last Wednesday. It looked clean-headers, three tidy paragraphs, a closing line about “key takeaways.” Within thirty seconds I knew I would have to redo it.
The numbers were vaguely off, the framing didn’t match what had actually happened in Q1, and one entire section was about a project we had killed in February.
I spent forty minutes rewriting it, then sent her a polite note saying I had “tweaked a few things.” Then I remembered: I had probably done the same thing to someone else on Monday.
The Rise of "Workslop": When AI Output Replaces Real Thinking
In September last year, Jeff Hancock at the Stanford Social Media Lab and a team at BetterUp surveyed 1,150 US desk workers about a phenomenon they coined “workslop”-AI-generated content that looks polished but offloads the thinking onto whoever receives it.
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Forty percent had received at least one instance in the past month. The average recipient said they spent one hour and fifty-six minutes dealing with each one. Extrapolated to a ten-thousand-person company, that came to roughly nine million dollars a year.
The numbers are self-reported, the study was sponsored by an AI coaching company that sells the solution, and it is a single survey rather than observation. The phenomenon, though, is real.
The recognition Hancock gives readers is the useful part. He calls one tell “purple prose”-three paragraphs where one bullet point would do.
Another: closing sections labelled “key takeaways” or “summary” that summarise nothing actually said. Another: confidently-worded specifics that turn out to be wrong on a second read. Each is the signature of generated text shipped without thinking the content through.
Every recipient of workslop is, somewhere else, also the sender. The colleague who sent you the Q1 summary you rewrote is also receiving the deck you generated and lightly edited before lunch.
Senders don’t know, because sending feels like work was done. The forty-two percent of recipients who said they trusted the sender less? That includes the recipients of your work.
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The Recipient’s Side
Hancock’s paper quotes a director in retail on what receiving workslop actually costs: “I had to waste more time following up on the information and checking it with my own research.
I then had to waste even more time setting up meetings with other supervisors. Then I continued to waste my own time having to redo the work myself.
Workslop doesn’t just take the recipient’s two hours. It pulls third parties in. The asymmetry is the heart of the cost: cheap to generate, expensive to receive.
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Thirty Seconds Before You Send
One thing to do this week. Before you send the next piece of AI-assisted work, open it and read it as if a colleague had sent it to you.
Check for three things: paragraphs that say nothing once you remove the polish, “key takeaways” that don’t take anything away, specifics you cannot personally confirm.
If you find any, fix or cut them before sending. The check takes thirty seconds. Most of what costs your colleagues two hours could be caught there.
—-Prompt N Productive—-