A New Generation of Worker: The AI Slop Machine
There is no doubt that AI is going to change the way we work. It’s happening right now. New ways of working are appearing; opportunities for incredible time savings, automation, and enhanced productivity seem to be popping up everywhere. But with this movement, a new breed of worker is starting to emerge: The AI Slop Machine.
You might already know an AI Slop Machine. There might be one on your team or in your company.
Convinced that AI is already making them 10x more productive, they look like the future. Generating content like there is no tomorrow, refusing to Google anything—preferring instead to ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or whatever model seems to be performing best this week. You can't have a call with them without their virtual note-taker listening in, sometimes without your knowledge. You can’t help but feel a little behind when you speak to them.
They are early adopters. They will not be left behind in this new revolution; they live in the trenches and will fight to stay ahead of the adoption curve. Even if they have to create an entire ecosystem of shadow IT, unsanctioned by the CIO. Even if they must take the risk of sharing sensitive data with an obscure new AI agent to avoid writing an email themselves. They are committed, and they look so productive, it’s hard to argue. The revolution is happening. Maybe they are a model, and maybe you should start doing it too.
Then one day, they come to you and ask for your help. They created a 20-slide deck and want to “run it by you” because it is your area of expertise. They've checked in some code, and you have a pull request awaiting your review. Or maybe they've drafted a proposal for a client and want your opinion.
As you go through the content, you understand that it is, of course, “Made with AI”—most likely made entirely by AI. You read on and you start catching inconsistencies, errors, and outright falsehoods. It hits you: it will take you 10x more time to review and correct the document than it took them to generate it. You have a choice: Do you spend that time reviewing? Do you send it back? Do you say a quick “looks good” and move on?
By now, the AI Slop Machine has gained traction in your company. They have been tasked with leading AI transformation efforts. You’d want to send it back to them and say, “I can’t use any of that slop, figure it out yourself," but that would not play well for you. If you let that content go without correcting it, you know things will end badly.
You finally understand that they’ve delegated the responsibility for their content to you. Content that they would have likely never created if it had not been that easy; content that you could have created yourself just as easily with the same two-line prompt. What’s the point? Is this content even worthwhile?
The answer is clear: you know no one will ever read this. The AI Slop Machine has already created many more documents like this one; there are wiki spaces and SharePoint folders full of them. So many, in fact, that the AI Slop Machine is piloting a chatbot to help navigate the mountain of content created. At first, people were interested in this content and started to use it. Quickly, though, people started asking clarifying questions: “This says we can do X, how does it work?" The answers were often the same: “Oh, that’s just an AI placeholder, you’ll have to adjust that,” or “Thanks for catching that, we can update it.” Slowly but surely, people understood that the content couldn't really be trusted and stopped using it.
This did not stop the AI Slop Machine, who continues to lead AI adoption and create content, with an unparalleled ability to find the next high-visibility project to apply AI to it, creating POCs that look great and are 70% useful but never able to close the gap to 100% and make it to production.
It does not surprise you anymore that you saw in the news that an MIT study shows that 95% of AI pilot projects fail. The AI Slop Machine is not a truly new breed of worker; it’s the same old ambitious, attention-grabbing, quick-win-focused persona, now equipped with a set of tools that 10x their impact.
