{"id":186000,"date":"2025-09-27T19:49:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T19:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/186000\/"},"modified":"2025-09-27T19:49:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T19:49:08","slug":"beware-coworkers-who-produce-ai-generated-workslop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/186000\/","title":{"rendered":"Beware coworkers who produce AI-generated &#8216;workslop&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Researchers at consulting firm <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.betterup.com\/research\" target=\"_blank\">BetterUp Labs<\/a>, in collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, have coined a new term to describe low-quality, AI-generated work: \u201cworkslop.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As defined in an article<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/hbr.org\/2025\/09\/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity\" target=\"_blank\"> published this week in the Harvard Business Review<\/a>, workslop is \u201cAI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">BetterUp Labs researchers suggest that workslop could be one explanation for the 95% of organizations that have tried AI but report <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.artificialintelligence-news.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/ai_report_2025.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">seeing zero return on that investment<\/a>. Workslop, they write, can be \u201cunhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context,\u201d which just creates more work for everyone else.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThe insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work,\u201d they write.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The researchers also conducted an <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/stanforduniversity.qualtrics.com\/jfe\/form\/SV_4Mjwa0jWw2Pu3TE\" target=\"_blank\">ongoing survey<\/a> of 1,150 full-time, U.S.-based employees, with 40% of respondents saying they\u2019d received workslop in the past month.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To avoid this, the researchers say workplace leaders must \u201cmodel thoughtful AI use that has purpose and intention\u201d and \u201cset clear guardrails for your teams around norms and acceptable use.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers at consulting firm BetterUp Labs, in collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, have coined a new term&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186001,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,109276,109277,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-186000","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-betterup-labs","12":"tag-stanford-social-media-lab","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}