The fact that a new global crisis appears every week is actually reassuring – civilization still has a pulse. The fact that this crisis no longer really interests anyone – well, that is a sign of progress. We live in an era in which we can choose between two permanent cataclysms: politics and artificial intelligence. Politics – with its endless stock of prefixes: geo, eco, and ego – now has to compete for the attention left over after our weekly dose of AI panic.
This week’s crisis has been given the name AI slop – in a special office edition. Harvard Business Review, as is its custom, sounded the alarm – how else can you sell business literature if not through the poetics of problems? The startup BetterUp, which specializes in tracking this slop, has put a price on the phantom pain of lost productivity. Their calculation is both elegant and tragic: a company with ten thousand employees loses nine million dollars a year to work slop. It follows that Latvia – without even realizing it – leaks about 590 million a year, thereby continuing the national tradition of invisible exports.
While our attention was captured by the political side of the apocalypse, AI slop got its own page on Wikipedia. There it is defined as a (very) low-quality unit of information that clogs communication and distorts the exchange of ideas. One might hesitate to ask whether Instagram, X, and LinkedIn feeds also count as slop, but they certainly look suspiciously similar.
There is an old saying about the marketing budget: you always know that half of it is wasted, but you never know which half. Today’s marketer, being more imaginative, assumes that all of it is wasted and sells you the pleasure of realizing this. The genius of artificial intelligence slop is that this epistemological fog has become an entire product category.
I firmly believe that no global crisis should go to waste. At such moments, the clothing of the world becomes transparent, and a wise observer must use this moment before the fabric weaves itself back together.
The contrast agent of modern work
One of the most poetic ways AI enters organizations is as a contrast agent – the same kind doctors used to give patients before an X-ray. You drink the potion, and the scan reveals your inner structure with terrifying precision. This latest hysteria about “AI at work” is just a collective intake of breath as companies, for the first time, see the capillaries of their bureaucracy – PowerPoint slides, reports, and dashboards circulating through the corporate bloodstream like cholesterol.
Many felt fear and disgust when AI revealed what actually flows through their companies. It is the same shock a person feels upon seeing their own tomography: Is this strange tangle of nerves really me? Unfortunately – yes. Behind every “brand guideline” hides a network of anxious neurons and unnecessary slides. Somewhere in this tangle there is also a divine spark – but for diagnostic purposes it is better to think of yourself as a set of pipelines.
GenAI has been in circulation long enough that its residues have settled in every vein and synapse of the organization. Thanks to this new contrast agent, we can finally see what we have long suspected but did not want to confirm.
The empty office
What do we see? Emptiness – vast, echoing emptiness. When the cost of content creation has dropped to zero, it becomes clear how little of this content was worth creating in the first place. The PowerPoint city built over decades suddenly resembles a ghost town – full of unfinished presentations and half-read reports. Let’s not be unfair to this tool – we already once blamed PowerPoint. Remember the 1990s, when every boring presentation was justified as “using new technologies”? The problem was never the slides – it was the lack of concentrated thinking.
A bit of meditation might help. Every serious practice begins with grounding. Before giving in to corporate melancholy, remember: gravity still works. Companies still have to create customers and make money. Those nine million dollars per ten thousand employees, calculated by BetterUp, are just as imaginary as the marketing budget that funded their research.
The summer essay problem
Remember the school essay “What I did this summer”? It was impossible to write because the gap between the joy of vacation and the seriousness of school was too big. Now the same discomfort is felt by managers facing the post-GenAI reality. The gap between old work and new work is so large that many can no longer say what their business actually does. They only know that it produces content – endlessly.
Both pure intellect and business process costs are approaching zero. If the old IT rule was: “If it works, don’t touch it,” now we are allowed to touch everything and do so repeatedly and in different ways. Experimentation, like gossip, spreads faster than its consequences. The water lane for trials is wide open, and the first swimmers are already getting dizzy.
Yes, we can now generate all those reports, dashboards, and overviews we have always claimed were necessary. But the more data we display, the less we remember why we collected it in the first place. Many projects die not from mistakes but from exhaustion – the complexity of implementation devours the simplicity of the goal. The most tragic words in business are not we failed, but we forgot why we started in the first place.
The divine right to create slop
It is worth admitting that there has always been slop in the system – not artificial, but our own. Handmade, artisanal, proudly human. That is exactly why the boom in AI slop cuts so deep – someone has broken into our oldest privilege: the right to create nonsense and call it work. Yet there is also an opportunity here. If we can withstand this shock of self-discovery, perhaps we will finally reconnect the how with the why, shorten the distance between intention and result, and turn intelligence – artificial or otherwise – into something resembling meaning.
For now, let us respect this revelation. AI has not ruined the work environment – it has only illuminated it. And if the picture does not look too flattering, remember: the first step toward beauty is better lighting.
Originally published at https://inc-baltics.com/mi-sluras-augsta-maksla/
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