AI Slop Is Eating Your Organization From the Inside

Three bullet points would have been fine

In 2024, Google ran an Olympics ad called “Dear Sydney”. A father uses Gemini to help his daughter write a fan letter to her favorite athlete.

The internet was… not exactly impressed.

Google pulled the ad. The backlash wasn’t about the quality of the letter — it was that a child’s genuine effort to express admiration had been outsourced to a machine.

The content might have been fine. The act was hollow.

Walk into any organization today, and you’ll find the same dynamic playing out on a smaller, quieter scale. Emails that are clearly AI-generated, sent to people who will clearly barely skim them. The lucky ones, that is. Most will have the title read and be instantly archived (and the rest will just die in the inbox).

And then we have Slack messages with that unmistakable ChatGPT cadence — slightly too polished, slightly too structured, slightly too long (and with way too many emojis).

Performance reviews that read like they were written by a thoughtful manager but feel like they were assembled by a machine. Which they were.

AI-polished documents that — and here is the thing - no one asked to be polished.

There’s an asymmetry here that bothers me. AI has made it trivially cheap to produce content — 30 seconds, and you have a polished update. But it hasn’t made it any cheaper to consume content. Reading a two-page document still takes the reader 15 minutes. Before AI, the effort of writing acted as a natural filter. If something was hard to write, you thought twice about whether it was worth the effort (first your effort, and second recipient’s effort). That filter is gone.

Unless your recipient also uses AI to summarise your messages! In which case, you’d have to be insane not to wonder what’s the point of this whole ceremony.

Who is all of this for?

This is all truly bizarre. Person A spends 30 seconds generating a polished two-page update. Person B spends 30 seconds asking an AI to extract the key points. The actual human-to-human information transfer? Three bullet points. But instead of just sending these three fucking bullet points, we’ve routed the conversation through two AI passes and wasted everyone’s attention in between (not mentioning the tokens, which are the cheapest in all of this grotesque performance).

Josh Bernoff wrote his seminal book “Writing Without Bullshit” before Gen AI was all the rage. His main point was that most business writing wastes the reader’s time — that every sentence should be useful or deleted. AI hasn’t fixed this. It’s made it dramatically worse by reducing the cost of producing bullshit to zero.

Going full circle to where we started, there’s a deeper issue here. Hywel Carver put it well at CTO Craft London this year. Here is the thing: some communication isn’t just about transferring information.

When your manager writes your annual feedback, part of the value is that they sat down and thought about your growth.

When a colleague sends a thank-you note, the effort is the message. If I told you “I generated your performance review with AI” or “I generated my thank-you message with ChatGPT” — would you feel recognised?

There are moments in organizational life where the effort is the point — where the act of sitting down to think about someone is what carries the meaning, not the words that come out.

The irony is that inside an organization, we don’t need polish. Externally, sure — clients, investors, and candidates expect a certain standard. With external audiences, we don't have shared context, so polish fills the gap. I can even understand - though I wish it wasn’t the case - that we generate a certain amount of marketing slop to pump up the volume.

But internally? An organization should value raw clarity over manufactured professionalism. Three bullet points in a Slack message beat a four-paragraph AI-crafted email every time. A rough sketch of an idea beats a polished deck no one reads.

“The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.” Blaise Pascal’s famous quote is today, after 400 years, more relevant than ever.

We’ve confused the appearance of thoughtfulness with actual thought.

And AI has made that confusion penny cheap.

---