One of the conclusions from new research from Stanford found many employees are now using AI tools to create low-effort and low-quality crap that ends up creating more work for their co-workers. Riffing on the idea of AI slop, researchers have named this “workslop”.
We’re drowning in lengthy reports written with a few words of a prompt. But underneath this shiny surface is the sad reality that the results are misleading, incomplete and not understood by the person creating it.
There are real-world consequences of outsourcing thinking to AI, just ask Deloitte Australia, which will take years living down its recent scandal of using AI to partially create an error-riddled $440,000 report for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations.
Workslop shifts the mental load from the creator to the receiver, and that’s laziness and insulting.
It also makes people think less of anyone who sends them AI-generated crap, when they wanted an intelligent and researched perspective.
In recruitment, AI generated resumes tell the recruiter that the sender is a lazy bastard who can’t be bothered using his or her brain. They won’t be hired.
So, is AI going to take your job? It depends but note Amazon plans to cut about 14,000 corporate jobs, as it ramps up spending on artificial intelligence while cutting costs elsewhere.
In June, the company’s chief executive Andy Jassy, said that he reckoned generative AI would reduce Amazon’s corporate workforce in the next few years.
Amazon has more than 1,000 generative AI services and applications in progress or built, but that figure was a “small fraction” of what it plans to build.
Mr Jassy encouraged employees to get on board with the company’s AI plans after it announced plans to invest $10 billion ($15.2 billion) building a campus in North Carolina to expand its cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
“If you believe your mission is to make customers’ lives easier and better every day, and you believe that every customer experience will be reinvented with AI, you’re going to invest very aggressively in AI, and that’s what we’re doing. You can see that in the 1,000-plus AI applications we’re building across Amazon. You can see that with our next generation of Alexa, named Alexa+,” he said.
About 32,000 jobs were lost in the American private sector in September. Many retailers are pulling back on seasonal hiring this year due to uncertainty over the US economy and tariffs.
Want to know why people aren’t spending in Australia?
Rising rents, hidden or unreported inflation (see Woolworths and Coles), the fear of AI taking jobs and rising unemployment and under-employment.
People are even renting out their holiday homes in NSW as people are not spending cash on recreation.