The Naivete of AI-Driven Productivity

The promise is not technically wrong, but sociologically naive

Yutong Liu / Better Images of AI / CC-BY 4.0

---

I’m running a Halloween sale for free subscribers at a 33% discount until November 3rd (Monday). I probably won’t do another one until 2026, so make sure to get yours at the reduced price of $80/year (vs $120/year).

Or get the normal monthly subscription here:

---

One must begin, as all serious discussions of technology do, with a neologism that perfectly captures a societal sickness, in this case, the term ”workslop,” which Harvard Business Review recently coined; the busy cousin of AI slop. Workslop denotes AI-generated work content that masquerades as competent output but is, in fact, cargo-cult documents that possess the formal qualities of substance yet entirely lack the conceptual scaffolding or contextual intelligence to advance a given task. Basically, if “fake email jobs” were fake as jobs and fake as emails.

HBR highlights that workslop is a phenomenon distinct from mere outsourcing because it uniquely employs the machine as an intermediary to offload cognitive labor onto another, unsuspecting human; a kind of bureaucratic hot potato that, according to one beleaguered retail director quoted by HBR, results in a cascading series of time-sinks: the initial time wasted in receiving the slop, the subsequent time wasted in verifying its hollow core through one’s own research, the meta-time wasted coordinating meetings to address the foundational inadequacy, and the final, tragicomic time wasted in simply redoing the work from scratch.