Many predicted that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) would increase workplace productivity exponentially because it can speed up trivial processes. This will also increase company revenue. But a few lunar cycles ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology NANDA (Networked Agents and Decentralized AI) published a report that generative AI integration failed in 95% of workplaces to increase company revenue. Today, the Harvard Business Review published a report on why this is happening.
According to the Harvard study, AI can produce a lot of documents in a very short period of time. At first glance, these documents seem very useful, but when read by humans, they do not offer any useful new information. As a result, this content, labeled as “workslop,” reduces workplace productivity by wasting the time of human workers who read it.
AI-generated reports are low quality, generic, superficial, too obvious and lack original ideas that make a meaningful contribution. AI models are very good at identifying patterns and combining existing information and content to produce reports. But it is not yet good enough to perform deep analysis, imagination, and the ability to create new concepts like humans.
In my personal observations using ChatGPT, CoPilot, and Gemini, I myself realized that AI is not efficient in detecting what is actually important information in a given document. During the recent IFA, I tried AI to summarize a pile of documents about the latest products that were launched.
About 80% of the summaries generated by AI, important information such as the most interesting features and the latest hardware are not included. So if you use AI to help do the work without any review, you will not notice a lot of information that is overlooked. It is even scarier if all the summaries and reports are done by AI at work. At the end of the day, the information that humans end up reading is no longer meaningful.
So use AI as a tool to get a quick summary but don't forget to do the review and read the original source yourself because artificial intelligence is still not a substitute for the original intelligence of God Almighty.