When I was a third-year medical student (many years ago), I rotated for a month on the pediatric neurosurgery service. I rounded every morning with the senior resident (who actually was the only resident that month) on all of the hospitalized patients that were being treated by the neurosurgeons. My job was to write the daily progress note in the medical chart, which I did while the resident examined the patient. The resident basically told me what I should write on the first day of the rotation, and after that I knew what the expectations were for what the daily progress note should look like. Here is a good example:
AF/VSS. Doing well, overall stable post-op course. Continue present plan.
Just to be clear, "AF" is short-hand for "afebrile" (no fevers) and "VSS" is short-hand for "vital signs stable." I will admit that there's nothing in that note that could be considered helpful! The note technically fulfilled the documentation requirements, but in reality my note added almost no clinical value for the next provider (or anyone who had to review the medical record in the future).
As it turns out, there's a term to describe what I wrote - it's called workslop. Apparently, the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) has popularized the term. I am starting to see a lot of articles on workslop, specifically in the context of AI. For example, the writer Jill Lepore recently wrote an article for The New Yorker magazine on slop (see "The prehistory of A.I. slop").
Interestingly, the editors at Merriam-Webster's online dictionary named slop as their Word of the Year in 2025. They define slop as digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence. Journalist Meghan Bobrowsky at the Wall Street Journal perhaps said it best when she said, "AI Slop is Everywhere". She writes, "Over the past few weeks, my Instagram has been filled with AI-generated cat soap-opera videos" and fully admits that she spends at least "a few mindless minutes" scrolling through the videos at the end of her day. Given the purported demand for this kind of digital content, she concludes, "But if the early results - and my own scrolling habits - are anything to go by, it's about to get a lot sloppier."
We hear a lot about AI and how AI is going to replace jobs. Organizations have invested heavily in AI, but according to a recent study from the MIT Media Lab, 95% of organizations have yet to see any measurable return on their investment. Workslop may help explain why.
As a team of investigators from BetterUp recently stated in an article published by Harvard Business Review (see "AI-generated 'workslop' is destroying productivity"), "Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers." They surveyed 1,150 employees across several different organizations and found that 41% reported receiving a specific instance of AI-workslop that adversely affected their work. Using this data, the investigators estimate that employees in organizations today spend on average 2 hours every day dealing with AI-workslop, which equates to about $186 per employee per month in lost productivity. For an organization of 10,000 workers, this translates to over $9 million per year in lost productivity!
The aforementioned investigators admit that they focused on the impact of workslop on productivity, but they suggest that "what should really worry leaders is the impact workslop can have on human relationships." They found that over 50% of workers perceive colleagues who send workslop as less capable, less trustworthy, and less intelligent. In other words, AI-workslop negatively impacts collaboration, trust, and engagement.
Some CEOs actually are mandating AI use by the employees in their organization, while other CEOs are telling their employees to "embrace AI or become irrelevant". Unfortunately, these kinds of mandates and recommendations will likely increase the prevalence of AI-workslop.
In a follow-up article, again published in Harvard Business Review (see "Why people can create AI 'workslop' and how to stop it"), the BetterUp team suggest that the proliferation of AI-workslop is a failure of leadership and results from a combination of unclear AI mandates and overwhelmed teams. They had a number of suggestions to make organizations more resistant to AI-workslop. First, leaders should dial back on unclear, blanket mandates to use AI. Just like any new technology, implementation of AI requires training and education of the employees within the organization. Building a culture of trust and psychological safety within the organization is equally as important. Employees should be able to admit openly that they used AI to develop a work product and feel safe asking for feedback on its quality.
The BetterUp investigators concluded, "The greatest irony of all is that to make AI work at work, we need to get better at being human. Leaders need to make space for the unpolished, slower-but-more-rewarding work of human collaboration. Without organizational changes that enable agency and trust, rather than AI mandates for overburdened teams, we'll all drown in the sludge of workslop."
