September 8, 2025 | 5 min read

What’s “Workslop?”: Why AI Is Making Us Do More Work, Not Less

Catherine Toms

AI Expert | Educator | Consultant

“Workslop” AI-generated content that looks polished but adds no value – creating more work instead of less.

Learn how to spot it, stop it, and avoid becoming part of the problem with these practical tips.

What Is Workslop?

We’ve all been there lately. Opened up an email, report, or document that looked impressive, only to realise it’s clearly been spat out by AI?

You get that sinking feeling straight away. The overly formal tone, the waffle, the random em-dashes and that unmistakable lack of human-ness.

You’re not going mad. You’ve been “workslopped”.

Harvard Business Review coined this brilliant phrase:

“AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”

Workslop “looks” polished, it’s well structured and sounds super confident. But once you dig in? There’s no substance, it’s often big on volume, worrying light on value.

Instead of making life easier, we’re all doing more work trying to interpret it, correct it, or completely redo what you’ve been sent.

The Real Cost of Workslop

AI-generated workslop is destroying productivity and damaging professional reputations:

50% view colleagues who send workslop as less creative and capable
42% see them as less trustworthy
37% consider them less intelligent

There’s another cost everyone feels: time. Anyone can whip up a 10-page document in five minutes with AI. Someone else then loses an hour trawling through it, trying to work out what actually matters.

Welcome to the AI-slop cycle.

How AI Workslop Became a Workplace Problem

To be fair, AI-generated workslop isn’t (entirely) our fault. We’ve spent years under pressure to “do more with less.” More content, more channels, more emails. Less time to think.

Then organisations dished out AI tools and said “use this to do stuff faster” – with no training, no policies, and no definition of what “good” AI-assisted work actually looks like.

So no wonder teams are drowning in their own workslop.

Your 3-step action plan to fight the slop:

1. Should I use AI for this task?

Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats… We can do it… but prefer not to.” ~ Daniel Kahneman

Our brains are lazy by design. Back in caveman days, thinking burned around 20% of our daily calories. So we found smart shortcuts, pattern recognition, confirmation bias, gut instincts. Anything to avoid the hard work of actual thinking.

That’s the risk with AI. We’re already hardwired for shortcuts, and AI makes it very easy to skip the thinking altogether. Make sure you’re using AI to boost your brain power, not replace it. Before you turn to AI, ask:

Have I actually thought about this?
Have I added my own insight and context?
Will this genuinely help the recipient, or just create more work for them?
Would I be proud to put my name on this?

If you can’t answer yes, are you sure you’re not just chucking more work someone else’s way?

2. Quality over quantity

AI makes it easy to churn out content at the drop of a hat. Which is exactly why faster is no longer better. Better is better.

The best marketers use AI to:

Speed up research and data analysis
Generate multiple messaging angles to test
Polish campaigns they’ve already thought through
Handle busy work so they can focus on strategy

They’re not using it to skip the thinking.

And audiences can spot the difference immediately. At best, crappy content gets ignored. At worst, it damages your brand reputation and destroys trust.

Stop worrying about quantity and dial up your focus on quality.