Send on one more polished, half-checked AI document and your colleagues will spend close to two hours fixing it. Then they will trust you a little less. A study this year put a number on that second cost, and it is the one nobody budgets for.
We have spent two years asking what AI can do. The sharper question, the one that decides careers now, is what your work does to the trust of the person who opens it. There is a name for the unread, low-substance output driving that erosion: workslop. Two in five workers received a piece of it last month, and forty-two per cent trusted the sender less afterwards.
The skill that survives all this is smaller and harder than any prompt. It is being willing to read your own work before it leaves your hands. I wrote about the trust it protects, and the three questions I run before anything with my name on it goes out.
Read the full essay on Substack → Workslop Is a Trust Problem
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