04-23-2026
Employer Insight: A recent Guardian article delved into an unintended product of AI called “workslop.” This term refers to AI output that seems polished but is actually flawed and inaccurate, requiring significant effort to correct, clean up, or completely redo.
A cybersecurity copywriter interviewed for the publication shared his experience with this phenomenon. This copywriter said his company laid off employees and encouraged the use of an AI chatbot to replace them. The chatbots created drafts that employees initially found helpful. However, the employees had to invest a significant amount of time rewriting and correcting errors in the drafts. This copywriter told the Guardian that the “quality decreased significantly, time to produce a piece of content increased significantly, and most importantly, morale decreased.”
In another example, a medical/doctoral student surveyed the staff at a medical clinic. He heard similar feedback about workslop. Staff used AI to create responses to patient emails, intended to save time. However, the staff had to spend time editing, checking for data security issues, and correcting errors, which ultimately cost more time.
These employees’ experiences showed up in recent data on AI. The Wall Street Journal reported that “40% of non-managers say AI saves them no time at all at work, while 92% of high-level executives say it makes them more productive.”
Stanford researcher Jeff Hancock (who coined the term “workslop”) attributes employee dissatisfaction to the lack of direction and support on how to use AI most effectively. Companies want to reduce their labor costs and have invested in AI tech. They are not yet seeing the returns on their investments. One researcher told the Guardian that part of AI workslop creation is the unclear mandate to workers on when to use it. Instead, it is being presented as a “general-use tool that can do anything,” but in reality, that is not the case.