Ken, a copywriter for a large, Miami-based cybersecurity firm, used to enjoy his job. But then the “workslop” started piling up.

Workslop is an unintended consequence of the AI boom. It’s what happens when employees use AI to quickly generate work that seems polished – at least superficially – but is in fact so flawed or inaccurate that it needs to be heavily corrected, cleaned upor even completely redone after it’s passed on to colleagues.

For Ken, the problem started after his company’s CEO laid off several of his colleagues and mandated that remaining workers use AI chatbots, saying it would boost their productivity. While initial drafts were a breeze to create, Ken and his co-workers had to spend more time rewriting, correcting errors and resolving disagreements between each other’s chatbots than if they had never used AI at all.

“Quality decreased significantly, time to produce a piece of content increased significantly and, most importantly, morale decreased,” said the copywriter, who spoke under a pseudonym for fear of losing his job. “Everything got a whole lot worse once they rolled out AI.” Ken said the company’s executives shifted the blame to staff when they pushed back about AI-fueled productivity decreases.

Gut writing and editing staff, insert hallucinatory LLMs. That’s got to be great for the product, right?