Fixing AI Convenience Behavior: Lead, Collaborate, and Mindset?
September 24, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I read “AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity.” Six people wrote the article for the Harvard Business Review. (Whatever happened to independent work?)
The write up reports:
Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers.
Let’s consider this statement in the context of college students’ behavior when walking across campus. I was a freshman in college in 1962. The third rate institution had a big green area with no cross paths. The enlightened administration put up “keep off the grass” signs.
What did the students do? They walked the shortest distance between two points. Why? Why go the long way? Why spend extra time? Why be stupid? Why be inconvenienced?
The cited write up from the estimable Harvard outfit says:
But while some employees are using this ability [AI tools] to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.
Yep, convenience. Why waste effort?
The fix is to eliminate smart software. But that won’t happen. Why? Smart software provides a way to cut humanoids from the costs of running a business. Efficiency works. Well, mostly.
The write up says:
we jettison hard mental work to technologies like Google because it’s easier to, for example, search for something online than to remember it. Unlike this mental outsourcing to a machine, however, workslop uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being. When coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context.
And what about changing this situation? Did the authors trot out the old chestnuts from Kurt Lewin and the unfreeze, change, refreeze model? Did the authors suggest stopping AI deployment? Nope. The fix involves:
- Leadership
- Mindsets
- Collaboration
Just between you and me, I think this team of authors is angling for some juicy consulting assignments. These will involve determining who, how much, what, and impact of using slop AI. Then there will be a report with options. The team will implement “options” and observe the results. If the process works, the client will sign a long=term contract with the team.
Keep off the grass!
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2025
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