Have You Been Workslopped Yet?

AI is making you clean up your colleague’s mess. Here’s what should you do about it.

There’s a new AI term making the rounds, and I’m utterly delighted by it: workslop.

Oh, how it rolls off the Schadenfreudean tongue! Oh, how I wish I’d coined it!

Alas, not I. Researchers at Stanford and BetterUp landed this gem on Harvard Business Review just last week, a fine pairing to the AI slop ruining everything from text to video to music to your toddler’s potty training.*

If you have not yet encountered AI slop, let me ruin your day for you. Behold Masters of Prophecy, one of the fastest-growing channels across all of YouTube. It went from a few hundred subscribers in February to over 36 million today. All of its music is AI-generated, dealing in quantity over quality. Curiously, it hopped from 300 subscribers to more than 100,000 in a single day without posting any new videos, shorts, or comments. Fishy much? Better yet, one of its videos (pasted below for scholarly purposes only) has over 100M views, which translates to $100k-$500k for the channel owner.***