How to protect yourself from workslop
Short summary
"Workslop" is when colleagues dump AI-generated text on you, creating an effort imbalance—they spend seconds generating it, you spend minutes reading it. The article outlines practical ways to push back, from direct refusal to using AI to summarize their AI, or simply ignoring low-stakes messages.
- The core problem is asymmetrical effort: AI generation is nearly free, but reading still costs you time, making it like a denial-of-service attack on your attention.
- You can counter workslop by treating lazy colleagues like coding agents (making them iterate), using AI to summarize their AI, or forcing synchronous communication where they can't paste blocks of text.
- For lower-stakes messages, you can just ignore or skim AI-generated content without guilt—if it's truly important, they'll explain it in their own words.
Full summary
"Workslop" describes a specific workplace problem: colleagues dumping large blocks of AI-generated text on you. The asymmetry is the real issue—it costs them almost nothing to generate but still costs you real effort to read. The author treats this like a denial-of-service attack, which is apt. If you have enough seniority or social standing, just tell people to stop. Otherwise, you need other tactics.
The practical defenses break into a few categories. You can use AI to fight back: paste their text into an LLM and ask for the key points, or generate your own response entirely. It's not ideal (you become part of the problem), but it rebalances the effort equation. You can also shift communication to calls or in-person meetings, which forces them to spend actual time and filters out people just being lazy. For lower-stakes stuff—status updates, external pull requests—you can simply ignore it. Match their lack of effort with your own.
The author makes an important distinction in the footnotes: not all AI-generated content is workslop. If someone genuinely invested their own time into it, even if the output has that AI flavor, it doesn't count. The defining feature is asymmetrical effort, not the mere presence of AI. There's also a note that some written artifacts exist for purposes beyond communication—covering your ass, ticking compliance boxes, creating evidence of effort—which changes how you should think about what you're reading.