AI Slop Is Wasting Your Team's Time. Here's How to Stop It.

A friend texted me from his team meeting. The new guidance there: don't use AI too much, because the work is starting to look like AI slop.

"Then use it properly so it doesn't," I wrote back.

Rationing the tool because of what people make with it on autopilot gets the problem backwards. The slop comes from people who take whatever the AI gives them and send it as is. His text reminded me of something my wife went through back when we worked together.

My Wife Hates Comic Sans

I met my wife at HotJobs, one of the earliest and most influential job boards. She worked in facilities administration, so a lot of her job was communication: policies, paperwork, announcements of what was coming, and compliance requirements people had to read and follow.

Then Yahoo bought us, and for a while Yahoo's default font for internal communications was Comic Sans.

It made her violently angry. She saw it as deeply unprofessional, and as working against what those documents were for, which was getting people to take them seriously, comply, listen and learn. She complained about it often, and righteously, and she switched the font back on every document she could.

She kept using the company's tools and fixed the default every time, because she cared whether people read the notice and did what it asked.

What Slop Costs the People Who Get It

A work document exists to get something done. A status report, a policy or a proposal is there to move a decision or an action forward for the business. Doing that well also means serving the reader: putting the information in a form that's clear, fits the audience, saves them time and helps them understand it. I think of that as a form of workplace respect, and as a way of giving people what they need to do their own jobs.

Slop serves the sender instead, and the costs land on everyone else.

It shifts the work to the reader. The sender skips checking, and the person on the receiving end has to find the mistakes. Researchers at Stanford's Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs call this "workslop," AI-generated work that looks finished and isn't. In their survey of desk workers, 40% had received some in the past month, and each instance took close to two hours to deal with.
It tells the reader the message doesn't matter. If it obviously took you two seconds to produce, they'll figure it deserves about two seconds of their time, even when what's in it is accurate.
It trains people to tune you out. This is the Comic Sans problem. Send enough serious messages in a format people find distasteful, and they start skimming everything you send, including the important stuff.
It damages your credibility, and your team's. In the same study, about half the people who received workslop rated the sender as less creative, capable and reliable. That impression follows you into the next thing you send.
It hides errors behind polish. Clean formatting and confident sentences make a wrong number look right, and a plausible mistake takes longer to catch than an obvious one.
It rewards quantity over quality. Volume has long been a way to look busy or to bury weak work, and the effort of producing things by hand used to keep it in check. AI took that brake off, and good work gets buried under everything else.
It provokes a backlash against the tool. Leaders see the slop, blame the AI and start rationing it. That's like telling people to stop sending email because too many people write in all caps.
It stops the sender from thinking. If the AI did the thinking, you can't defend the work, explain it or get better at it.
It lowers everyone's sense of what good looks like. When slop is most of what people see, the bar drifts down, and newer people learn their standards from it.

AI Is a Junior Employee, and You're Accountable for Its Work

Using AI to help write something is a lot like handing the job to a junior person on your team. If what they send out is unclear or wrong, it reflects on you and your team, and catching it before it goes out is your job. You're accountable for what an AI drafts for you in the same way. I wrote about that ownership in Your Name Is Still on It.

So there's no excuse for sending slop, and it's completely solvable.

I do have some sympathy for how it happens. People get very busy, and the AI does a pretty good job. It even makes possible communication that wasn't going to happen at all before. All of that gets canceled out, or worse, when the person sending it doesn't take responsibility for its quality.

Six Ways to Stop Sending Slop

Review it the way you'd review a junior employee's draft, because your name is on it.
Change the defaults. Give the AI your voice, your audience and the format you want, instead of accepting its house style.
Bring the substance yourself. The thinking and the point of view come from you, and the AI helps you put them into words.
Edit for the reader. Make it shorter, lead with what they need and cut the filler.
Send less, and make it better. If you didn't take the time to get it right, don't ask someone else to take the time to read it.
If you lead a team, set a quality bar instead of a usage limit. Show people what good looks like and train them to get there.

Change the Font

AI made quantity cheap, which means quality counts for more than it used to. Quality got cheaper too, for anyone who uses the tool properly.

My wife fixed Yahoo's font one document at a time, because she wanted people to read what she sent and act on it. Most AI tools let you set your defaults once and keep them. So before your team starts rationing the tool, try changing the font.

If Slop Is a Problem Where You Work

Helping teams solve problems like this one is my job now. I can help you set a quality bar for AI-assisted work, set up the tools your people already use with your voice, your audiences and your formats so drafts start closer to right, and train your team to review AI drafts the way they'd review a junior employee's. I know how to fix this, and I'd love to help. Your first hour is free. Start at wespomeroy.com or message me here on LinkedIn.