Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn 1033: Workslop: The Hidden Cost of AI-Generated Work, with Prof. Jeff Hancock and Dr. Kate Niederhoffer
In Episode #1033, Prof. Jeff Hancock (Professor of Communication at Stanford) and Dr. Kate Niederhoffer (Chief Scientist at BetterUp) join Jon Krohn to explain the hidden cost of AI-generated work. A year ago they coined "workslop" in a Harvard Business Review article that went viral and landed the term among Merriam-Webster’s words of the year: content that masquerades as real work but quietly shifts the burden onto whoever receives it. Their research finds that 40% of workers have been sent workslop and 53% admit to producing it, at a cost running to millions of dollars a year for a large organisation. In this episode, they separate workslop from ordinary sloppy work, name the organisational conditions that produce it, introduce their newer concept of relation slipping, and make the case that augmenting people with AI beats automating them away.
Additional materials: https://www.superdatascience.com/1033
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In this episode you will learn:
- (00:04:03) What separates workslop from ordinary sloppy work
- (00:16:21) The organisational conditions that produce workslop
- (00:41:50) The pilot mindset, and using AI relationally
- (00:56:21) Jeff on the deepfake case and what it taught him about trust