Sloppy
“Sloppy” – A cartoon that illustrates how we stop AI from making one person more productive at everyone else’s expense.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke recently coined the term “slop grenade” to describe a growing workplace problem in which someone uses AI to churn out a lengthy document, email or piece of code, then dumps it on colleagues without bothering to check whether it’s any good.
Microsoft found that 90% of surveyed AI users said it saved them time, yet research by BetterUp and Stanford found that 40% of US desk workers had received AI-generated “workslop” in the previous month, spending nearly 2 hours on average dealing with each instance. Someone congratulates themselves on producing a twenty-page report in minutes, while their colleagues spend the afternoon checking its claims and trying to understand what was actually being proposed.
But, we’ve encountered this problem before and maybe there are lessons to be learned. PowerPoint made it easy to assemble impressive presentations without developing a coherent argument, prompting Amazon to replace slides with written narratives of up to six pages. The idea was to make authors work through their reasoning before asking others to consider it.
Toyota addressed a similar problem in manufacturing through jidoka, a principle that emphasizes identifying and stopping defects at their source rather than allowing them to travel down the production line for someone else to fix.
So, what are some ways to deal with the slop grenade? Require a one-page summary that explains the recommendation, its reasoning and what’s genuinely new. The sender should verify the claims and take responsibility for the conclusions, with anything that falls short returned for further work rather than repaired by the recipient.
AI has made it remarkably easy to produce material that looks finished, even when the thinking behind it isn’t. As Jeff Bezos wrote in his 2017 Amazon shareholder letter, “the great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind.
Sources:
Dmitry Malin (Apr 22, 2026) – AI Slop Is A Leadership Problem – Forbes
Julia Korn (Aug 11, 2026) – What To Do When Your Colleagues Are Producing AI Slop – Forbes
Sasha Rogelberg (Aug 20, 2026) – ‘Buyers aren’t yet opening their wallets’: AI-generated assets are flooding marketplaces, but consumers are snubbing them for human-made products – Fortune
