The artificial intelligence boom and subsequent emergence of “slop” – mass-produced, low-quality digital content – has finally infiltrated the workplace.
Employees are using AI to create “workslop,” which is defined as work that is rushed and inaccurate, and in order for it to be presentable, it must be redone. The problem is so widespread that 40% of U.S. desk workers received some form of it in August 2025, according to a study conducted by BetterUp and the Stanford Social Media Lab.
It would be easy to pin the blame on the employees themselves, who have all the incentive in the world to make their lives easier by using AI. While there are surely employees who do, the blame cannot fall on every individual.
Rather, workslop is the product of a culture that minimizes the importance of an employee, pushes the value of productivity above all else and, more recently, has placed a level of trust in AI that it has not earned at all.
It must be acknowledged that for many employees, using AI is not a choice.
As the AI boom expands, companies are heavily promoting these tools to reduce labor costs.
If an employee can do a job with AI for a lower cost than without, then there is little reason not to use the tool. As a result, employees are pressured to use AI to the point that for some, the consequences of not doing so can be as severe as being laid off.
However, studies find that a majority of employees report that AI saves them little to no time at all. A Wall Street Journal survey found 40% of workers said AI saves them no time at all, and 27% said it saves them less than two hours a week.
These claims are not unfounded – workers need to spend ample time resolving AI workslop incidents that end up on their desk. On average, each incident costs two hours of correction to resolve. Annually, the productivity loss costs $9 million for a company with 10,000 employees, according to the BetterUp and Stanford survey.
AI workslop rarely improves productivity, results in millions in lost revenue and is generally an unamusing prospect to employees. It doesn’t make sense why businesses are still engaging with it so heavily.
In the face of this new technology, businesses are expected to capitalize on the wave of hype surrounding AI. If the projected gains of AI are real, it implies greater productivity, which is a good metric for Wall Street investors. In fact, after Block’s CEO, Jack Dorsey connected company layoffs to AI productivity gains, the company’s stock price shot up 20%.
When looking at examples like these, the reasoning behind the layoffs is not so difficult to understand, at least from the business side. Just the promise of efficiency can be tempting, even if it means less productivity and layoffs in the short term.
Whether this pays off in the long run is debatable. The market has incorrectly approximated the value of technology in the past, like the dot-com bubble, and there is no sure guarantee that these layoffs and the heavy integration of AI will pay off.
As of right now, it doesn’t seem to be either. An MIT study found that despite a total investment of $30 million to $40 billion of enterprise investment into AI, 95% of corporations have received zero return.
In the meantime, though, companies are not waiting around to see if the uncertainty resolves itself. This workslop is a result of their decision to choose to capitulate to market pressure and the idea of future gains.
But while the decisions can be reasoned with, it doesn’t change how businesses are effectively gambling with their own workers. They are willing to lay off real, skilled humans in favor of a technology full of flaws.
In other words, they are prioritizing the fantasy promise of AI over the actual value of their own employees.
It signals how expendable an employee is to a manager or executive if their job isn’t worth as much as an unrealized fantasy of further productivity.
Unfortunately, the fact that employees aren’t treated well isn’t anything special, especially as of late. College graduates are facing the worst job market since the start of the pandemic, automated bots scan resumes to auto-reject prospective employees and mass layoffs are sweeping across industries. In that context, an employee realizing they are expendable is nothing new.
