Your AI just created more work and called it productivity

Congratulations! Your AI Just Created More Work (And Called It Productivity)

Let's talk about the elephant in the server room: we're drowning in AI-generated nonsense, and we're calling it innovation.

A recent study from BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab, published in HBR, gave a name to something we've all been experiencing: "workslop" - that beautifully formatted, impressively lengthy, completely hollow output that AI spits out when someone hits "generate" instead of "think"

Link here: https://lnkd.in/dd2ws6sE

The statistics are deliciously ironic. Forty-one percent of workers have encountered this in the past month. Each instance may cost up to two hours of rework.

Fantastic example would be Delloite getting caught with ConsultantSlop: https://lnkd.in/dRpaDDvD

I'm genuinely excited about AI - when used by people who understand that technology amplifies intent, not replaces it.

Imagine two colleagues writing to a client about a project delay:

Person A thinks: "We're three weeks behind because the API integration revealed data quality issues we didn't anticipate. The client needs to know this impacts their March launch, but we can mitigate by prioritizing core features first." Then uses AI to polish that thinking into professional prose.

Person B opens a blank email, types "write professional email about project delay," and forwards whatever emerges.

Both emails look equally polished. One advances the work. The other creates a new job: deciphering what actually happened and what to do about it.

When we celebrate "80% of our emails now use AI assistance", we're conflating these wildly different behaviors. We're measuring keystrokes saved, not value created. If your KPI is "percentage of emails drafted by AI," you've fundamentally misunderstood the assignment.

The research identifies "pilots" versus "passengers" - people with high agency who use AI purposefully versus those who use it to avoid thinking altogether. Pilots generate better outcomes. Passengers hit "make longer" and forward the result, offloading their cognitive work onto colleagues.

The consequences? Half of recipients now view workslop senders as less capable, creative, and reliable. Trust erodes. Collaboration fractures. But hey, we automated seventeen tasks this quarter!

The path forward isn't less AI - it's less indiscriminate AI. It requires something quite radical: thinking about what we're trying to achieve before we type a prompt. It means accepting that some tasks genuinely benefit from AI assistance, while others just need a human to do the work.

My provocation for you: What if we stopped celebrating AI adoption rates and started measuring AI value rates? What if we acknowledged that the most productive use of technology sometimes means having an actual thought first?