AI promises productivity. It's delivering 'workslop'

The tech industry promises that the billions being spent on AI will make us all more productive. The jury is still out on the results.

- Catherine Thorbecke

Most of us have encountered “AI slop”, the deluge of low-quality content produced by generative artificial intelligence tools that has inundated the internet. But is this computer-made hogwash taking over our work as well?

News that Deloitte Australia will partially refund the government for a report sprinkled with apparent AI-generated errors has caused a local furore and spurred international headlines.

Ms Barbara Pocock, an Australian senator, said in a radio interview that the A$440,000 (S$372,000) taxpayer-funded document misquoted a judge and cited nonexistent references. The alleged AI mistakes are “the kinds of things that a first-year university student would be in deep trouble for”, she said.

Deloitte Australia didn’t immediately respond to my request for comment, but has said the corrections didn’t impact the report’s substance or recommendations, and told other outlets that: “The matter has been resolved directly with the client.”

Besides being a bad look for the Big Four firm at a time when Australians’ trust in government use of private consulting firms was already fraught, there’s a reason it has struck such a nerve.

It has reopened a global debate on the current limitations — and high cost — of the technology backfiring in the workplace. It isn’t the first case of Al hallucinations or chatbots making things up to surface in viral ways. It likely won't be the last.

The tech industry’s promises that AI will make us all more productive are part of what is propping up their hundreds of billions of dollars in spending.