Published on the 07/10/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

Just trojan horse that work on to someone else…

AI is supposed to boost productivity and make work – and life – easier. But instead it’s created a new problem: Workslop.

That’s according to a Harvard Business Review report authored by a team of researchers, which coined the term to describe the low-quality, AI generated content now clogging up many worker’s lives, just as Shrimp Jesus, Super Cat League and assorted other low quality, mass produced – and frequently bizarre – AI slop does your social media feeds.

“If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped.”

Workslop is the content such as reports that on first glance looks fine, but on closer inspection something’s not quite right, though working out what exactly often isn’t obvious and takes time to work out – or in HBR terms, it’s ‘content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task’.

While some are using the wealth of AI tools available today to ‘polish’ good work, others are using it to bypass putting in the effort.

“You might recall the feeling of confusion after opening such a document, followed by frustration – Wait, what is this exactly? – before you begin to wonder if the sender simply used AI to generate large blocks of text instead of thinking it through,” the HBR piece says.

“If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped.”

That low-effort work actually creates more work for coworkers who are often required to decode the content, infer missed or false context and potentially rework content. One director in retail noted they had to waste more time following up the information and checking it with their own research, then waste more time setting up meetings with other supervisors to address the issue. And that’s before having to redo the work themselves.

The researchers write that the ‘insidious effect’ of workslop is that it ‘shifts the burden of work downstream’, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. “In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.”

“What a sender perceives as a loophole becomes a hole the recipient needs to dig out of.”

The report found workslop is rife across industries, particularly technology and professional services.

The report, interestingly, comes as Australia’s Department of Employment and Workplace Relations confirms professional services firm Deloitte will be refunding part of its contract for a $440,000 report. The issue? It’s full of errors, including the misspelling of a Federal Court judge’s name, with non-existent references and citations, fabricated quotes and provides advice ‘inconsistent with the research cited’. Deloitte has admitted it used genAI to help write the report.

For Deloitte, it’s a high profile fail. For businesses in general, the HBR report suggests the proliferation of workslop that may be behind the lack of value being seen by many companies despite big AI investment.

Of the 1150 US-based employees across various industries surveyed for the on-going research which was carried out by BetterUp Labs and Sandford Social Media Lab, 40 percent reported having received workslop in the last month, spending an average of one hour and 56 minutes dealing with each instance.

That’s adding real costs for business, with the researchers estimating those incidents carry an ‘invisible tax’ of US$186/month – a sum that quickly adds up in terms of lost productivity.

Beyond that, the report says there’s a human cost, with workslop impacting how colleagues think of each other. Sending workslop? Your colleagues will likely see you as less creative, less capable, less reliable, less trustworthy and less intelligent.

Most of the time, the poor AI content is being sent between peers, but 18 percent of the time it’s going up the chain to managers and 16 percent of the time it’s flowing downwards from managers to their teams ‘or even from higher up that that’.

But HBR notes that in some ways, this is not a new story.

“There has always been sloppy work. We are prone to procrastination, to shortcuts, to leaning into busywork instead of careful thinking when we are tired. GenAI gives us a new technology with which to lean into the same old bad habits – but now with the added cost of creating more work for our colleagues and undermining collaboration, at scale.”

So what’s the solution?

The researchers recommend not encouraging employees to use AI everywhere. If you do ‘don’t be surprised when they do – without discernment’.

“GenAI is not appropriate for all tasks… To be sure, AI can positively transform some aspects of work, but it still requires thoughtful guidance and feedback from workers in order to produce useful outputs on complex or ambiguous work.

Instead, leaders should offer clear guidance on where AI adds value and where it doesn’t and reinforce the need for human oversight.

‘Intentional, creative’ AI use, rather than using AI to avoid effort, with leaders modelling that behaviour for others, and ensuring collaboration is standard and the importance of clear context, feedback and shared responsibility is emphasised is also urged.

“When AI-generated work is sloppy, the cost isn’t just time, it’s trust.”