A potential solution to AI slop

Time to Write: Approx 90 minutes*.

Most articles and newsletters come with a “Time to Read” estimate at the start. But when I’m reading something online, I can’t help but second-guess when and how the writer used AI.

Because I run an AI capability building firm, I think about this stuff all day. Writing that has leaned too heavily (or exclusively) on AI stands out to me like Comic Sans on a wedding invitation (and apologies if that’s your vibe).

And when I wonder to myself “is this article worth my time?”, the question I’m really asking is: Did the author delegate their thinking and writing to AI, and am I now the idiot spending my morning reading the output?

Most of Inventium.ai’s work is with big organisations. Multiply this problem across a few thousand employees and you get a very large, very expensive productivity problem.

Researchers at BetterUp Labs and Stanford University gave the phenomenon a name: Workslop. Work that looks finished but has nothing much inside it. They found 41% of workers have been sent it (although I daresay this statistic gets higher every day as AI adoption increases), and I really hate to think about how many hours per week we all spend trying to decipher it.

Meanwhile, leaders are scratching their heads about why the promised AI productivity gains haven’t shown up. A 2026 survey of nearly 6,000 executives across four countries found 89% could see no measurable impact of AI on their firm’s labour productivity over the past three years.

I think Workslop explains a decent chunk of that.

(The other chunk: almost nobody is training their people properly on how to use the AI licences they’ve bought. Which, IMHO, is bordering on insanity, given the power of the tool and the un-intuitiveness of extracting value from it.)

So this is what I propose.

Instead of a Time to Read measure, I am going to give you, my wonderful One Percent Better reader, a Time to Write measure. From today onwards, every post you receive from me will tell you how long it took me to make. Use it as a data point on how much of your time it deserves.

And if you’re feeling enterprising (or you’re just sick of the slop), try this on your team:

Tell me in the comments whether this is something you might adopt on your Substack, in your work, or with your team.

*My Time to Write metric includes pondering (I spend a fair bit of time tossing around ideas in my mind before committing digital pen to paper), the writing, the editing (which is where I bring in a Claude Skill I created to help me), and a final human edit and polish.