Think before you slop

In case you missed it, Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year was “slop.”

Defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,” slop is everywhere: in silly videos on social media feeds; in unsettling photos of fake people; in hallucinated content found in books, magazines, and even highly regarded newspapers.

Increasingly, slop is also showing up in our workplaces: in reports, emails, briefing notes, presentations … you name it. In fact, AI-generated workplace slop is now so common that it has its own name: “workslop.” The term comes from researchers at BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab, who define it as “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” In a survey of over 1,100 U.S.-based employees, a whopping 40 percent reported having received workslop in the last month.

It’s easy to understand how workslop happens. With just a few keystrokes, you can prompt an AI bot to produce a report. With a few more prompts, you can turn that report into presentation slides, an illustrated brochure, a social media post—whatever you want. It takes seconds to produce what would have taken you hours to turn out on your own.

The result of this eerie magic may look professional and polished on the surface, but it’s often just a collection of vague, undeveloped ideas and inaccuracies—that is, workslop. As the BetterUp and Stanford researchers put it, workslop “shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work.” It also damages productivity and interpersonal relationships; the researchers found that about half of their survey participants “viewed colleagues who sent workslop as less creative, capable, and reliable than they did before receiving the output.”

Workslop takes very little thinking to create, and therein lies the problem. Writing is thinking. To write effectively, you need to think about, among other things:

• Why you’re writing
• Who your reader is and what they need to do with the information
• Your reader’s characteristics, like their existing knowledge, language skills, context, and frame of mind
• How to organize, word, and present information to best serve the reader
• The tone you should strike in the document

Writing is also a process of discovery. As you write and revise, you clarify your understanding, make new connections between ideas, reach conclusions, or possibly change your mind.

Many workplace writers shortchange the thinking part of the writing process even when writing on their own. Now AI tools make it that much more tempting to do so.

I’m not saying you should avoid using AI for workplace writing. AI is useful for tasks like brainstorming and making certain kinds of edits. It can also generate draft content that’s targeted to your specific reader and purpose—but only if you craft meaningful prompts by thinking through the listed items above. (And notice the word “draft” there: always evaluate and revise AI content using your own human judgment and care.)

The point is that AI can’t think for you. When you give up that most critical and creative part of the writing process, workslop awaits.