AI was supposed to make us more productive. Instead, we may be using it to create more information, and more work, for everyone.
A famous line often attributed to the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
Nearly 400 years later, AI lets us write a longer letter in seconds. That may be part of the problem. AI is supposed to make us more productive. But when anyone can generate a three-page email, a 20-page report, or a 50-slide presentation almost instantly, we risk creating more work for everyone on the receiving end. What takes me 30 seconds to write might take you 20 minutes to read, understand, and respond to.
We’ve made it incredibly easy to produce information, but we haven’t made it any easier to determine which information actually matters.
Information Is Not the Same as Insight
Every major wave of technology seems to arrive with the same promise: We’ll become so productive that we won’t need to work as much. The internet was going to do it. Mobile technology was supposed to. Now AI will. And there’s no question AI can save enormous amounts of time. It can summarize documents, analyze data, write code, draft emails, and create presentations in seconds.
But I’m beginning to wonder whether we’re giving some of that productivity right back by creating vastly more work for everyone else to handle. There’s even a term for it: “AI slop.” Researchers use the term to describe AI-generated work that looks polished but lacks the substance or context needed to move it forward. Instead, it shifts the burden onto the recipient, who has to determine what it means, whether it’s accurate, and what they’re supposed to do with it.
That’s the paradox. It may take me 30 seconds to use AI to write a three-page email, but I’ve just given you 20 minutes of work. Multiply that geometrically across an organization, and suddenly everyone produces more and drowns in information.
A friend of mine who works with management teams has a great way to describe the problem: “We’re drowning in information and starving for insight.” In other words, in an AI world, generating information is cheap, but creating insight is valuable and rare.
AI can take that problem to an entirely new level. We can now generate reports, emails, analyses, proposals, and presentations faster than ever before. But just because we can generate all that information doesn’t mean we should.
I recently spoke with an AI engineer who has adopted an interesting rule. When someone sends him something clearly AI-generated without much thought, he figures he should spend roughly as much time responding as the sender spent creating it. If they spent 2 minutes, he should spend the same.
You can see where this goes: AI writing slop to AI as humans become increasingly irrelevant and uninterested in the conversation. We haven’t eliminated work. We’ve created an information arms race and clogged your organization’s communication channels.
Remember What You Learned About Writing—Then Forget It
Part of the problem may be how many of us learned to write. In school, we were rewarded for showing how much we knew. A 10-page paper was better than a two-page one. Big words were better than small ones. We added background, citations, and complexity to prove we had done the work.
Business writing requires almost the opposite skill. When I coach people on business communication, I tell them: “Get to the bottom line up front, or BLUF.” Please tell me what you want me to know. Tell me why it matters. Give me only the supporting information I need to decide or act. Don’t show me everything you know. Show me that you understand what I need to know. Anything more than that, you are trying to get credit for doing the work, not moving the decision forward.
AI makes it incredibly easy to fall back into the first mode. Give it a prompt, and it will happily produce five pages when five sentences would do. The hard work is no longer in producing the information and deciding what matters. Insight and context is where the value lies.
Use AI to Think Better, Not Just Produce More
That’s where I think leaders need to shift the conversation about AI. The goal shouldn’t be to maximize how much content our people produce. It should be to improve decision quality and speed. Use AI to analyze, summarize, and challenge your thinking to uncover patterns you might have missed.
But before you hit send, pause. Ask: Is this accurate? Is it insightful? Does the recipient need all of it? Can I make it shorter? What decision or action am I trying to enable?
In other words, AI shouldn’t relieve us of the responsibility to think. It should give us more capacity to assess and analyze what matters most. Pascal understood something centuries ago that may be even more important in the age of AI. Generating more words is easy. Knowing which ones matter takes work and time.
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