AI and great work

AI was meant to speed up work, but instead it’s flooding us with "workslop"; shiny output that slows everyone down.

Author

Malcolm Frank, CEO
September 29, 2025

AI and great work

Back in the dark ages (OK, the ’80s), I was eating dinner with my mother, watching TV.  Through the 13 inch RCA, Peter Jennings was reading the news. Out of nowhere, Mum said: “When you grow up, never read what others write. Write it yourself. And if you can’t, stay quiet, for you have nothing to say.” Gulp. It was a lot for a young teenager. But lately, I’ve been thinking about that advice as AI buries us under a mountain of manufactured prose.

Last week, Harvard gave it a name: workslop. AI-generated memos, presentations, and reports that look like work but create no progress. The surface is polished; the substance is mush. And every time one of these artifacts lands in an inbox, someone else has to interpret, correct, or redo it. The effort doesn’t disappear; it just compounds and slides downstream.

This is the strange new economy of AI at work. We were promised rocket fuel; instead, many companies are producing unrefined crude. The cost isn’t just wasted hours (Harvard pegs it at millions per year for big firms). It’s cultural: colleagues stop trusting one another, managers mistake volume for value, and signal drowns in synthetic noise.

The irony is painful. AI is supposed to accelerate work. Used poorly, it’s slowing us down.

“Workslop:” AI-generated work content is slowing everything down  

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And one more thing…

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