Slop Science 101

Here’s a head-scratcher

Companies handed AI to everyone. People used it twice as much. And yet — 95 out of 100 companies saw no real payoff.

All that effort, no result. When that happens in science, it means something invisible is eating the gains. So I went looking for it. 🔍

“Workslop”

Workslop (noun): AI writing that looks finished but isn’t.

It’s shiny. It’s confident. It says almost nothing. So the person who receives it has to stop and figure out what it actually means — or redo it. The work didn’t disappear. It just got shoved onto someone else’s desk.

Real scientists checked

This isn’t my opinion! Researchers at BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab asked 1,150 workers a simple question: how much slop are you getting, and what does it cost you?

The data doesn’t lie

And get this — slop changes how people see you. After receiving it, about half thought the sender was less capable, and a third didn’t want to work with them again. Yikes!

Two beakers. Watch closely!

Beaker A took five seconds to write and two hours to clean up — on the other person’s bench. That’s not a time-saver. It’s a mess that pops up somewhere else. Science!

It escaped the lab

Inside a company, a coworker usually catches the slop. But the same AI now writes the messages that go OUT — to customers, prospects, and regulators.

And out there? Nobody’s checking it first. The experiment runs straight onto your customer’s desk. (Fun fact that is not fun: last time firms ignored unwatched messages, regulators handed out $2 billion+ in fines.)