Michelle Volberg, CEO of the tech recruiting firm Twill, recently urged her staff to communicate more authentically, rather than sounding robotic. She noticed an increase in formal messages and suspected they were generated by AI tools like Claude. The messages were polished but lacked client context and included errors.
Volberg had introduced an enterprise Claude subscription for her team. Now, she emphasizes using AI for brainstorming while maintaining personal communication styles. This change restored creativity and relationship-building in her company.
The term “workslop” refers to low-quality, verbose AI-generated content burdening workplaces, coined by Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs. Bosses are inadvertently contributing by encouraging AI use, creating a new challenge of balancing AI’s productive uses with avoiding inefficient content.
Kate Niederhoffer of BetterUp Labs emphasizes that workplace conditions, not individual behavior, drive workslop. Leaders need to create environments where AI discussions can improve workflows, ensuring employees don’t merely produce excessive, subpar output.
Lazy use of AI by some workers and blurred guidance on its application have resulted in a surge of workslop. Companies are starting to measure AI tool usage in performance reviews, though standards vary. AI hasn’t fulfilled promises of increasing productivity; instead, it occasionally results in longer hours and poor-quality work.
Research shows over half of workers admit sending low-quality or unhelpful AI-generated work, indicating compliance with AI, possible innovation, or user fatigue.
To combat slop, companies like Clay have implemented AI writing policies, encouraging responsibility behind content creation and brevity for clearer communication of ideas. Similarly, Spellbook CEO Scott Stevenson prefers concise, thoughtful proposals over refined but soulless documents.
Workslop can waste time and erode trust. Eric Fischgrund of FischTank PR bans AI-written content for pitches and uses AI detectors to ensure compliance. He faced repeated breaches from one employee, resulting in termination.
ZocDoc’s recent guidance stresses transparency in bot-to-human communication and maintaining original ideas. They aim to preserve employee value by focusing on quality input from workers rather than AI.
To eliminate workslop, fostering an environment where employee opinions are valued and AI is not seen as a threat may prove more effective than enforcing strict communication rules.