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Case study · Survey research

Workslop: the cost of unedited AI output

In a survey of 1,150 US employees, 40% had received AI-generated work that looked polished but didn’t do the job.

Principles involved

When and where

September 2025

United States

What happened

In September 2025, researchers from Stanford’s Social Media Lab and the coaching company BetterUp described a problem many people recognized: AI-generated work that looks polished but lacks the substance to move a task forward. They called it workslop.

In their survey of 1,150 full-time US employees, 40% said they had received workslop in the past month. Those who had put the share of workslop in what they receive at 15.4%, and said each case took an average of 1 hour and 56 minutes to deal with. The researchers estimated the cost at US$186 per employee per month.

What the sources establish

The figures are self-reported, from US employees only, and the survey isn’t peer reviewed. The sources don’t say how respondents were recruited or weighted, and BetterUp sells coaching services. Treat the numbers as a signal of how common the experience is, and the cost estimate as a rough guide.

Implications

AI moves work from the writer to the reader. A message that took you a minute to generate can take a colleague an hour to understand, fix or redo. The respectful move is to spend your minute editing, so they don’t spend their hour.

Recommended practice

  1. 01Put the point first and cut the rest.
  2. 02Add what only you know: your judgment, the context and the decision you need.
  3. 03If you receive workslop, ask kindly for what you need, and agree a format as a team.

Sources

What each source establishes, and its limits. The practices and recommendations on this page are ours, and the facts come from the sources. See every source we use.

  1. AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity Harvard Business Review (Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp researchers) · September 22, 2025 · Survey research Defines workslop. Of 1,150 full-time US employees, 40% received it in the past month, and each case took an average of 1 hour and 56 minutes to deal with. Limits: Self-reported, US only and not peer reviewed. The survey method isn’t fully described, and BetterUp sells coaching services.

Cite this page

Founderz (2026). Workslop: the cost of unedited AI output. The RUAI Standard, 2026 edition. Developed by Founderz in collaboration with Microsoft. https://responsibleai.founderz.com/toolkit/case-studies/workslop

Licensed under CC BY 4.0: share and adapt with attribution.