If you work in marketing, you’ve almost certainly been handed some AI slop grenades already. It’s the polished-looking, AI-generated work that someone passes to you without really checking it, and according to research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford, it’s costing people an average of 3.4 hours a month to fix. Here’s how to handle it when it lands, what to actually say, and how to stop the next one arriving.
What is AI slop?
AI slop is AI-generated work that looks polished but hasn’t been properly checked, so someone else ends up having to fix it. Researchers at BetterUp Labs and Stanford call it “workslop”: content that looks finished but doesn’t have the substance to actually move a task forward.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke has a name for AI slop that gets passed to a colleague without a proper check: slop grenades.
“We call those ‘slop grenades’ that people toss at each other. That’s definitely a bad thing.”
It looks polished, it’s well formatted and sounds confident. Then someone who actually knows the subject reads it, and it falls apart.
The person who pulled the pin saved themselves ten minutes. The person who catches it loses an hour or more, and it’s more common than you’d think: in the same research, 38% of workers said they’d received this kind of work, and over half (52.7%) admitted to sending it.
Why do AI slop grenades hit marketing hardest?
Nobody asks ChatGPT to redo their accountant’s tax return. Marketing is different, for three reasons:
- Most people believe they understand marketing. Everyone uses social media and sees adverts every day, so it feels familiar. But familiar isn’t the same as understood: in Marketing Week’s salary survey of 3,435 marketers, 61.8% said their business only somewhat understands marketing, or doesn’t understand it at all.
- Results feel subjective. A post, a headline or a campaign idea is easy to have an opinion on, so it’s easy to believe an AI version is just as good.
- We’re already over-explaining. Marketers spend a lot of time justifying their decisions, and not by choice. Gartner found only 52% of senior marketing leaders feel they can prove marketing’s value and get credit for it, and 47% of CMOs say marketing is seen as an expense. Every slop grenade adds another round of explaining on top of that.
The unfair bit is who throws them. Often it’s the same people deciding whether marketing is worth the budget. They create the extra work, then judge the team on how long things take.
What the AI output is missing
AI can produce something that looks like a strategy in seconds. What it can’t produce is the thinking behind a good one:
- Experience: years of seeing what actually works, and what quietly flops
- Learning: the degrees, qualifications and constant upskilling behind the instinct
- Psychology: an understanding of why people buy, click, ignore or scroll straight past
- Trends: what’s landing right now, not what was in the training data
- Full context: the brand, the budget, the audience, and what was tried last year and why it didn’t work
- Accountability: AI doesn’t have to stand behind the result, you do.
That’s the gap every AI slop grenade falls into. The output is only as good as the context the person gave it, and a quick prompt rarely carries much.
How do you handle AI slop grenades when they land?
You don’t have to pull the whole thing apart line by line. The aim is to respond in a way that’s quick and calm and doesn’t damage the relationship, whether it’s come from your boss, a client or someone in another team.
- Check what they’re actually asking for. Before you spend any time on it, work out whether there’s a real request underneath, and whether it’s actually yours to solve. A quick check-in does the job without sounding defensive: “Before I dig into this, I want to check you’re after X. I’ve got it down as a medium priority, does that sound right?”
- Pick your one or two biggest points. You don’t need to review every line or write a report on it. Find the thing that matters most, usually the audience, the goal or the budget, and lead with that.
- Buy yourself some time. You don’t have to respond on the spot, and a rushed reply is where things get awkward. Something like “Thanks for sending this over, I’ll have a proper look and come back to you by Thursday” gives you space to think.
- Be honest when it’s not right. This is the hardest one, especially when it’s your boss. It helps to frame it around the goal you both want, rather than whether their idea is good or bad.
How do you stop AI slop landing in the first place?
Prevention saves more time than any fix, and these work whether you’re in-house, freelance or agency side:
- Give ideas somewhere to go. Set up a shared doc or a simple form where anyone can drop ideas, AI-generated or not, and review it on a set day. It turns inbox ambushes into a list you manage on your own terms.
- Share your plan before anyone asks. When people can see what you’re working on and why, they’re far less likely to fill the gap with something they generated in five minutes.
- Show your thinking, not just your output. Share results, the reasoning behind your decisions and what you learned along the way. The more visible your expertise is, the less a ChatGPT answer looks like a fair alternative.
- Help people prompt better. If colleagues are going to use AI anyway, give them the context it needs: the brand, the audience, the goals and what’s already been tried. Better input means less slop landing on your desk.
- Agree priorities with your manager. If unplanned reviews keep eating your week, raise it early. Agreeing what comes first gives you a fair, blame-free reason to say “not right now”.
None of this is about banning AI. It’s about making sure the person with the context is the one making the call.
AI slop FAQs
What’s the difference between AI slop and AI slop grenades / workslop?
Workslop is the term BetterUp Labs and Stanford researchers use for AI-generated work that looks finished but lacks the substance to move a task forward. AI slop is the broader term for low-quality AI content. In a work setting, they mean the same thing: polished-looking output that someone else has to fix.
How much time does AI slop waste?
People who receive it spend an average of 3.4 hours a month fixing it, according to BetterUp Labs and Stanford research with 962 US desk workers. That’s up from around 2 hours the year before.
How do I tell my boss their AI idea won’t work?
Frame it around the goal you both want, not the quality of the idea. Try something like: “I don’t think this one will get us where we want to go, and I’d rather say that now than spend budget finding out. Here’s what I’d suggest instead.”
Should marketers stop using AI?
No. AI is genuinely useful for first drafts, summaries and getting past a blank page. The problem is AI output that gets passed on without being checked, so use it, then apply your own experience and context before anything goes out.
The bottom line
We use AI at Rate every day, and honestly, it’s brilliant at plenty of things: getting a first draft out of your head, summarising a long report, or pulling ideas together when you’re staring at a blank page. What it can’t do is sit in the room, know that the last campaign flopped because the timing was off, or understand why your audience would roll their eyes at a particular phrase. That part still needs a person, and more often than not, that person is you.
So the next time a slop grenade lands on your desk, take a breath before you pull it apart. Pushing back on AI slop doesn’t make you difficult or precious about your work, it’s exactly the job you were hired to do.
If AI slop is eating more of your week than it should, get in touch. We’d love to help you build a way of working that keeps the good ideas coming and quietly filters out the noise.