{"id":562196,"date":"2026-05-02T09:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T09:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/562196\/"},"modified":"2026-05-02T09:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T09:52:09","slug":"ai-workslop-is-taking-over-our-offices-heres-how-to-spot-who-is-using-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/562196\/","title":{"rendered":"AI workslop is taking over our offices \u2013 here\u2019s how to spot who is using it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your support helps us to tell the story<\/p>\n

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.<\/p>\n

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.<\/p>\n

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.<\/p>\n

Your support makes all the difference.Read more<\/p>\n

Over the past year or so, Gina* has noticed a new and frustrating burden seeping into her working day. As a communications specialist, helping fellow colleagues to write statements and emails, articles and LinkedIn posts has always been a big part of her job. But now the drafts that she receives from her co-workers all seem to possess the same \u201cweird, inhuman tone that just jars when you read it\u201d. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s because instead of just having a go at setting out their thoughts themselves, as they would have done in a pre-AI era, they\u2019ve fed a few ideas into chatbot, then sent the results over to Gina \u2013 often without checking it over themselves. She now has to spend hours amending \u2013 and humanising \u2013 this AI-generated work, \u201cand it\u2019s way harder than editing a person\u2019s writing\u201d. She has had to start \u201csending email and article drafts back to people and asking them to \u2018de-AI\u2019 it because it sounds so weird. And I\u2019ve had people get mad at me for doing that\u201d. <\/p>\n

Gina is drowning in AI \u201cworkslop\u201d. This material seems just about plausible and passable on the surface, but probe a little further and you soon realise that it\u2019s either utterly lacking in substance, or littered with errors (perhaps both). It\u2019s polished but empty, slick but soulless. \u201cThe problem is that there\u2019s not a lot of awareness of how AI slop reads, how obvious it is and how bad it makes both people and companies look,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m not against AI at work at all, but I think people need to do more to educate themselves about using it more intelligently and not relying on it for absolutely everything.\u201d <\/p>\n

She is certainly not the only one that\u2019s fighting a tide of slop. Last year, a survey of US workers reported that 40 per cent had received workslop from their colleagues in the past month. Another UK-based report<\/a> estimated that employees are spending almost as much time verifying, checking or redoing work produced by AI as they do using it throughout the week. The same report found that 32 per cent of employees are suffering with AI burnout, mental fatigue resulting from constantly checking AI output. <\/p>\n

The irony, of course, is that we\u2019ve been told again and again that AI is going to revolutionise the working world for the better. And yet for some, these advances only seem to be making work more difficult, more arduous. In a recent survey from the software company WalkMe, 66 per cent of respondents said that AI doesn\u2019t actually help them to work faster or give them more free time. Towards the end of last year, the Harvard Business Review went so far as to declare that workslop is \u201cdestroying productivity\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"SomeSome workers report feeling burned out by the burden of checking and correcting AI-generated work (Getty\/iStock)<\/p>\n

When employees are \u201cunder constant pressure\u201d, exhausted by \u201cjuggling multiple demands\u201d, AI can seem to \u201coffer a shortcut that feels \u2018good enough\u2019\u201d, says Fred Funck, director of executive coaching programmes at the Centre for Creative Leadership<\/a>. If expectations are sky high and deadlines are tight, it\u2019s easy to see why a worn out worker might turn to ChatGPT or Copilot in their hour of need. For many, Funck adds, \u201cAI feels like a kind of digital magic wand. It removes friction, reduces cognitive load, and delivers instant results. In a world that increasingly values convenience, this is incredibly seductive\u201d. <\/p>\n

But while using AI might seem efficient in theory, often the slack still needs to be picked up elsewhere \u2013 by other colleagues. \u201cThe cost of poor AI output does not always sit with the person who generated it,\u201d says Nick Renner, skills forecasting partner at training provider BPP<\/a>. \u201cA manager may quietly rewrite something that reads oddly to avoid delays, or a colleague may step in to fix a presentation before it reaches a client.\u201d <\/p>\n

This \u201ccorrective work\u201d, he adds, tends to happen \u201cinformally as part of everyday work\u201d \u2013 and so it can be hard to quantify its impact. \u201cWhen an hour is saved producing a first draft, but 40 minutes is then spent verifying, correcting or rewriting it,\u201d Renner says, we are simply shifting the \u201cbottleneck\u201d in the workflow from production (the time spent writing) to review (the time spent editing). So AI hasn\u2019t necessarily reduced the workload, it has just moved it around a little. This, he notes, \u201craises a fundamental question about efficiency: Is time genuinely being saved, or is the constraint just moving downstream?\u201d<\/p>\n

Rosie Wilkins, brand strategist and founder of Brand by Design<\/a>, is familiar with these frustrations \u2013 in fact, she\u2019s often the one taking on this \u201ccorrective work\u201d. She works with small businesses to help them craft a more authentic presence online, but recently, she says, \u201cI feel like I\u2019ve massively hit this wall of AI\u201d, with some clients sending her Google Docs filled with AI-generated copy for social media posts. \u201cYou didn\u2019t write this, you definitely haven\u2019t read it back, and it\u2019s taking me longer and longer to make revisions and changes.\u201d <\/p>\n

The cost of poor AI output does not always sit with the person who generated it<\/p>\n

Nick Renner<\/p>\n

She often ends up slogging through \u201cparagraphs of nothing\u201d \u2013 and has become all too aware of the tell-tale signs that hint that a piece of writing is the work of ChatGPT or Claude rather than a living, breathing human. \u201cI think the one that we all know is the em dash (\u2014), which is frustrating because I have always used that a lot in my writing,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd the idea that everything is done \u201cquietly\u201d, that\u2019s one that really irritates me \u2013 the word quietly is used a lot.\u201d Indeed, while writing this piece, I received a good few emails from experts telling me about how workslop is \u201cquietly\u201d taking over our inboxes \u2013 oh, the irony. <\/p>\n

AI copy, she adds, \u201cseems to be churn out short little sentences rather than flowing\u201d (see all those long LinkedIn posts laid out like a modernist poem). But \u201cas soon as people start noticing these things, they start saying to their AI, \u2018don\u2019t use this,\u2019\u201d she notes. \u201cThen something else will crop up. So in a couple of months\u2019 time, we\u2019ll probably be pinpointing different things.\u201d <\/p>\n

Workslop is not just irritating, it can have real, tangible consequences. In April, a Wall Street law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, had to apologise to a New York federal judge after filing court documents that included AI-generated \u201challucinations<\/a>\u201d, such as incorrect citations and misquoting US bankruptcy code. And in 2025, the consulting firm Deloitte had to partially refund its $440,000 AUD fee after a report it produced for the Australian government was found to feature AI errors. <\/p>\n

All of this raises one glaring question. Why are people still submitting workslop, when it is so obviously detectable, and there is such potential for reputation-damaging errors? \u201cSome genuinely can\u2019t see the problem,\u201d says Renner. \u201cThey have stopped reading their own output critically, because the act of generating it [with AI] felt like work.\u201d And, he adds, \u201cif nothing happens when poor work is submitted, the behaviour persists\u201d. <\/p>\n

\"IsIs AI saving us time at work \u2013 or just shifting the burden to others? (Getty\/iStock)<\/p>\n

Wilkins, meanwhile, thinks we have almost reached a point where AI is so lauded that \u201cit feels like the original thought that we had maybe isn\u2019t good enough\u201d, even though \u201cthere\u2019s nothing wrong with the way your brain wanted to put that sentence together or the way you wanted to communicate that idea. Because AI is so prevalent now, we\u2019re made to feel like [our work] could be better, so we need to run it through AI. But it was fine in the first place\u201d. <\/p>\n

In the longer term, there is a risk that, just as muscles weaken over time without use, we\u2019ll see \u201ca gradual erosion of core skills like thinking, writing and structuring ideas\u201d, says Funck. And it\u2019s not just those at the start of their careers who risk missing out.<\/p>\n

Our professional judgement, Renner says, gets built up \u201cthrough the act of struggling with the work, not just completing it\u201d. If younger workers are \u201cconsistently shortcutting that struggle\u201d, he explains, \u201cthose capabilities may never fully develop\u201d. And for those with more experience, \u201cthe removal of learning-by-doing work creates a different risk\u201d, that of \u201cexpertise atrophy. Skills that are not exercised will decay, even when they were once well established\u201d. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a depressing picture \u2013 although Renner does note that the human capability to recognise \u201cwhen an AI output is good enough, when it is subtly wrong, and when it is confidently wrong in ways that will cause real problems\u201d is likely to become an \u201cincreasingly valuable\u201d skill. <\/p>\n

So next time you\u2019re tempted to try and placate that colleague that keeps \u201ccircling back\u201d about that report by sending over some badly tossed word salad? Just know that said colleague is entirely aware of what you\u2019ve done \u2013 and is probably seething with resentment. The least you can do is get rid of those em dashes. <\/p>\n

*Name changed for anonymity <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":562197,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-562196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562196\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/562197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}