Work slop is real. And it's getting embarrassing.
⏱️ Read Time: ~ 2 min
This week I want to share something fun with you. Fun, yet totally relevant for each and everyone of us.
The internet is full of terrible content. Things that sound good but make absolutely no sense at all. And it seems to be getting worse.
Last week, I received two unsolicited messages that made me laugh out loud and then made me a little sad for the people who sent them.
Example one.
Someone reached out to tell me how much they loved my positioning around helping coaches and consultants make sense of AI. They acknowledged that generating a consistent pipeline of clients as a small business is genuinely hard. So far, so good, they clearly did their homework.
Then they invited me to an event where I could network with CHROs from across Switzerland.
CHROs. Chief Human Resources Officers. Large corporates.
I help coaches and consultants. Solo operators. Small businesses. You know, the exact people they described two sentences earlier.
I replied. Politely. I asked them to delete my data (there was no unsubscribe button, which is its own problem), and I gently pointed out that their email didn't quite add up. I also mentioned (okay, maybe a little cheekily) that it looked like it had been written by AI without a human ever reading it back. And that, if they wanted, I could help them fix that.
I couldn't help myself. The work slop was just too good.
Example two.
The Australian Swiss Chamber of Commerce invited me to an event about being an expat in Switzerland, with helpful tips on retirement planning and navigating the Australian tax system.
I did a study abroad in Australia once. That's it. I have never been part of the Australian tax system. Not once.
Someone scraped some data, fed it to an AI, and hit send. No one read it. No one caught it.
That's work slop.
The real lesson.
Does this make AI bad? I’d say no. This isn't a failure of AI. It's a human failure.
AI outputs can sound great at first, well written, engaging. But that doesn’t mean they actually make sense. And yes, humans get complacent. We get good AI output and develop a bias that suggests we can skip our own review.
I'm not anti-AI. You know that. I literally help people use it better. But AI without human judgment isn't efficiency. It's noise. And right now, the internet is filling up with it fast.
Key Takeaway
Better automation is not an edge. Authenticity is. As is knowing how to use AI to help amplify your edge. That's the real competitive advantage.
Before you let AI generate an email, a post, whatever, feed it your context, views, insights. Before you hit send on an email, read it. Out loud if you have to.
Til next time, keep it human
Elena
P.S. Have you received a work slop message lately? Hit reply and send it my way, I'm collecting them. 😄
