Last week I sat in on a high-level meeting. The chair proudly announced they had used ChatGPT to generate the agenda.
It showed.
What could’ve been 5 bullet points was instead 3 pages of word salad. Everyone spent more time deciphering than deciding.
Harvard Business Review (HBR) calls it “workslop”
And it’s now everywhere.
The HBR study argues AI is pumping out low-value content that clogs our inboxes and slows us down.
- When receiving workslop, 53% report being annoyed, 38% confused, and 22% offended.
- 34% of people who receive workslop are sharing these incidents with colleagues, potentially eroding trust between sender and receiver.
- 32% who have received workslop report being less likely to want to work with the sender again in the future.
Meanwhile, Accenture/Udacity’s survey of 2,000 professionals, highlights similar findings:
- 3 in 4 quit using tools mid-task because outputs weren’t good enough.
- 45% do not trust the quality of a colleague’s deliverable if they know it was created with the help of AI.
- 34% think less positively of colleagues who regularly use AI in their work.
- 36% would rather colleagues avoid AI use in their deliverables altogether.
What are these studies pointing out?
- AI use is almost ubiquitous.
- Yet, instead of taking tasks off our plates, AI often creates more cleanup.
- We’re stuck in a “productivity paradox”: high AI activity, low value.
What’s the antidote?
We already know we have to be conscious of the reputation we are projecting when sharing any work product with colleagues – whether AI produced or not.
But AI has seemingly made us lazy – thinking quantity is a substitute for quality.
Here are three tips that I use every day that can help reduce the workshop:
- Give the AI a role. The role concisely articulates to the AI what might otherwise takes hundreds of lines of explanation on what it should produce and how.
- Check out my video to see what happened when I asked ChatGPT to take on the role of Steve Jobs: Steve Jobs Predicted THIS AI Use Case in 1983 (10 mins)
- Aggressively tailor the prompts you give the AI model, as well as the outputs the AI produces.
- This is my video explanation for turning AI slop into AI gold: 2 tricks that make your work shine (5 mins)
- Give the AI examples of your past work and instructions for how you’ve produced it,
- Page 11 from the summary of my book, Do More With Less: The AI Playbook, show an example of this: Book Summary [PDF]
And if you want to go deeper, join my complimentary AI Masterclass – where I show teams how to avoid the productivity paradox and actually get ROI.
Here’s the invite form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf8ZbGGY1ZdaiUxxCOTTS3CIFmkO9f-oSzU0cfYLjO_cQn7dw/viewform
Let’s stop drowning in workslop – and start mining AI for real gold.