AI Slop is all over social media, and it's also at our workplaces.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Nufusafo.

AI Slop is pointless content shared online, fake images and videos mostly.

A research paper in the Harvard Business Review wants us to consider a variant, work

slop, AI-generated reports, emails, etc. that are sloppily put together.

The paper's authors say 40% of workers, they surveyed,

have encountered work slop, and that's costing time and money. We spoke with one of those authors,

social psychologist Kate Niederhofer. She's vice president of Better Up Labs, a consultancy involved

in the study. And she told me that work slop harms interpersonal work relationships,

such as when one employee receives an AI written report from another.

Some of the quotes that we got from people describing the experience from them were so rich.

They talked about creating situations where they had to decide whether they would rewrite it

themselves, whether they would make the other

person rewrite it, or whether you just accept it and think this is what work is like from now on.

But it definitely creates this confusion as to how to act on it and how do you engage after the fact that you've received it.

And there's also a cost involved. I was fascinated to see that you

guys were able to put a number on it. Tell me about that. Yeah. So as part of the research,

what we did was figure out when people experience it, how much does that cognitive rigoril

really cost them in terms of their time? And then we figured out based on the time,

the prevalence and the incidence of how much experience with workslop they have and their salary,

how much is it costing a given organization? If it takes someone just under two hours to deal

with every single episode of this, then there's an enormous cost to the organization at

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