This is an IHeart podcast.

One of the first examples that I saw was a really long memo with this style that we talk about as purple prose.

It's like when people just use really flowery language that's elaborate and long.

Kate Niederhofer is a social psychologist and the vice president of Better Up Labs,

which recently conducted a study about a new phenomenon in the workplace, AI Workslop.

We ask people to share examples of Workslop that they've received.

They'll tell us, like, there's this weirdness, like, there's something off about this,

and feeling so confused and unsure what the content is really about.

But then it's like, I don't know what to do about this. I don't know

if I should just redo it myself, start from scratch, tell the person, ask the person. Sometimes

there's a power dynamic that makes it really complicated to even engage. And so it leaves people

sort of paralyzed. It's like, I don't know what this is,

what it means or what to do about it. And I still have to do the work.

What Kate's study found is that contrary to what AI companies have been promising,

AI is creating more work for people. We're having to spend time reading emails written by

chat GPT, watching automatically generated PowerPoint presentations,

and dealing with computer code that looks okay, but doesn't actually run properly.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is telling his workers to use AI to work five times faster,

and a bunch of companies are still laying off employees under the assumption that they can

save money by just using AI to do that work.

What we're doing is slashing the human and eliminating that whole productivity potential.

I think it's backfiring because you're having a well-being tax on the people who stay,

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