Work slop

noreply@beansprout.observer (B.S. Observer) — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 22:05:02 +0200

Today I’m reporting from muddy trenches in the fields of mediocrity where work slop is not just accepted, it’s endorsed.

The first lines of trenches were drawn when your colleagues suddenly discovered that the synthetic output of a text-extruding machine could pass for a job done. Everyone was a bit excited at the time, and generating slop was a bit of a silly take on the job at hand. The trench digging started right after your colleague asked you to review more lines of code or text than usual. It continued with you running to the trenches after you had your first argument with your coworker about the chatbot being wrong and about the need to double-check its output. Now we’re here, covering in deep trenches under a bombardment of thousands of lines of code and text that a human would never have produced in the past, yet a human is expected to read and vet.

There is a limit to your patience when covering in the trenches. At some point you’re likely to go on attack. The poor sod bearing the brunt of the heat may find it unexpected but the fault ultimately lies with your existing biases amplified by their work slop. Being just annoyed or having an argument with your peer is one thing; however if you are in a position of power, your amplified biases may affect your coworker’s performance evaluation and eventually their salary.

As Alex Hanna puts it in her video¹ explaining the myth that “AI use will raise wages”:

… generative AI can reduce wages in other ways, namely by punishing workers who use the tools and pass on work slop to their colleagues. … researchers report that receiving generative AI text or images from colleagues results in lower perceptions of the competence of their colleagues. Getting slop from your colleague makes you think worse of them. And if those workers are women or older or people of color, then it confirms their co-workers biases against them.

There are ways to deal with biases, and some work slop can be eliminated by existing processes at your disposal, or just by communication. The problem arises when the pressure to generate work slop is exerted by external forces. If your boss expects you to produce results faster using a word-guessing program, are you going to lower your quality bar or slowly slide towards karōshi² - a death by overwork?

Your health is important, but so is the sense of a job well done. If you don’t trust the machine, you spend a lot of time reviewing its output. If it outputs a large amount of data, you become a bottleneck when reviewing it all. At some point you find yourself at odds with the clock. When you reach that fork in the road, you will likely opt for lower-quality output because time is the scarcest resource, and spending it on slop is not worth it.

The low quality, however, will come back to haunt you sooner or later. It can be your coworkers thinking less of you, the hours of maintenance later, or unhappy customers trashing your brand. Outsourcing quality to a word-guessing program, will leave you with the fallout.

The trenches in the fields of mediocrity are filling up with slop. Climbing out means joining a herd of reverse centaurs³ who are there not to oversee the AI’s work, but to take the blame for its mistakes. Staying in means keeping control but also working more hours to keep up with the slop while being called a loser or “the professional fax machine operator in the internet age”⁴.

The future may seem bleak, but don’t worry. The AI bubble will soon burst, and you’ll be in a better position being assisted by a word generator than assisting one.

References

Comments

@beansprout_observer@mastodon.social

Work Slop on Bean Sprout Obeserver

Work slop

References

Comments