Workslop and the depth you can't fake

Workslop is everywhere now, and the honest question is whether the average reader can tell the difference. Often they can't, at least at first.

That's what I told TechNewsWorld for John P. Mello Jr.'s story, "Experts Warn AI-Generated Documents Can Weaken Brand Trust (opens in a new tab)." It's worth reading in full. Several people in it make good points. I want to expand on one that I think gets less attention than it should: who actually pays for workslop.

What workslop is

The term comes from BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab, writing in Harvard Business Review in September 2025. They defined it as "AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task." In their survey of 1,150 US workers, 40% said they'd received some in the past month, as TechCrunch reported (opens in a new tab).

A more recent Templafy survey (opens in a new tab) of 2,000 knowledge workers in the US and UK found that 59% say AI-generated documents can make companies "sound too similar." Nearly everyone, 95%, edits AI output before using it, and accuracy is the most common fix. And 42% named loss of trust or credibility as a top risk.

Sameness isn't new

Here's where I part ways with some of the conversation. The usual argument is that AI makes every company sound alike, and that sameness weakens credibility.

I'm not convinced it does, at least not on its own. For more than 12 years I worked in-house at large financial institutions and other large organizations. Very little of the public-facing material I saw, from anyone, was truly different from everyone else's. Websites, brochures, slide decks: polish, mostly. People understood that. What clients paid for was the expertise underneath, and the name on the door.

Sameness on the surface isn't new. AI didn't invent it. It just made it cheaper.

Who really pays

That's where the trouble starts, and it doesn't land evenly.

Big brands get the benefit of the doubt. If a household name sends a generic proposal, most readers assume there's real depth somewhere behind it, because the name has earned that assumption over decades.

Small businesses don't get that assumption. They can't lean on brand recognition, so they have to prove their depth in every document. When a small firm's proposal reads like it could have come from anyone, the reader doesn't conclude "there must be more behind this." They conclude there isn't.

Daniel Burrus put it well in the same TechNewsWorld story: "A polished document that wastes a client's time can make the company look less capable, even when its people have real expertise." For a small firm, that's the whole risk in one sentence. The expertise is real. The document hides it.

Invented figures leave a sour taste

The other thing that's changed is how easy it is to check.

For a long time, a busy manager reading a sales deck had very few ways to cross-check its numbers. Today that check takes minutes, and AI is part of the reason. So when an invented figure turns up, it lands harder than it used to. It tells the reader nobody bothered to check, not even by asking the AI to check its own work.

For a small business, one made-up statistic can undo a lot of hard-won credibility. Better to use fewer numbers and be able to source every one.

What depth looks like on the page

The good news for small firms is that depth is still very hard to fake, and readers know where to look for it.

1. Specific lessons, not general advice. What you learned on real work, including what didn't go well.
2. Real tradeoffs. Every honest recommendation gives something up. Say what.
3. Sources a reader can check. Fewer claims, each one traceable.
4. A named person behind the words who can answer the next question.

That last one matters most. Audiences already come to the table with a healthy grain of salt. The follow-up questions quickly give away anyone who's all talk. Depth is how experts earn their keep: lessons gathered over many years and many projects, successes and failures alike. No amount of generated content can fake that in a real conversation.

None of this means small firms should avoid AI. Used well, it gives a small team real leverage. Let it draft, check and format. Just make sure a person who knows the work shapes what goes out, and stands behind it.

Go figure

In the early years of my business, before AI-generated content had really arrived, people would sometimes ask me whether my articles were written by AI.

They weren't. Go figure.

The suspicion arrived before the technology did. That tells you how much readers already value knowing there's a real person behind the words. For a small business, that person is the advantage. Don't hide them behind a template.