Workslop: Examining the prevalence, antecedents and consequences of low-quality AI-generated content at work

Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the workplace has skyrocketed but produced ambiguous effects, raising questions of when AI use may be beneficial or harmful to productivity and collaboration. To understand the conditions under which AI workplace use is harmful, we examined workers’ experiences with AI-generated workslop: low-quality, predominantly AI-generated content that appears to fulfill a given task, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance the work at hand. We conducted a representative survey of American full-time desk-workers (n = 962) that found that 52.7% reported sending some amount of AI-generated workslop to others. This behavior was more common among people who had high trust in AI, low agency over AI use, organizational encouragement to use AI, and low psychological safety at work. A substantial proportion (38%) also reported receiving work from their colleagues or teammates that they would consider to be workslop, and that the effort involved in processing, discussing, and revising - or even redoing - the work cost them around 3.4 hours per month on average. In addition to consuming workers’ time, receiving workslop negatively affected their mood and harmed their perceptions of their colleagues as trustworthy, reliable collaborators. Together, our findings paint a cautionary tale regarding AI integration into the workplace by highlighting how using AI under certain circumstances can be counterproductive and undermine interpersonal relationships.