Harvard Business Review (HBR), defining AI slop's professional cousin, workslop, as "AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task," highlights that workslop uniquely passes on cognitive offloading to another human (the 'my LLM created this for me, now you make sense of it' practice we're all painfully familiar with at this point).

HBR estimates an invisible workslop tax of $186/month/employee. for a 10k strong workforce, at an estimated prevalence of 41% of office workers—moat notably in tech + professional services—engaged in this practice, that's upwards of $9 million an organisation of that size will lose annually to workslop productivity.

this is excluding the social + emotional costs that join in as second-order effects of receiving workslop (eg how to formulate a diplomatic response, asking someone to redo it or just do it yourself, etc.)

What a sender perceives as a loophole becomes a hole the recipient needs to dig out of." —HBR, Year in Tech 2027

it's also eroding professional trust; lessening people's perception and views of the workslop sender: less creative, less capable, less reliable, less trustworthy, and less intelligent—aka the competence penalty.

I'm not seeing this yet in companies I'm working with, but it's so incredibly imperative that employees be trained in how to use AI discriminately (eg BetterUp's differentiation between Pilot + Passenger AI users), including in the form of company standards, policies, and best practice guides. AI that replaces thinking rather than augment it, is a cancer not only to any org but a cancer of the mind 🤕