General Urban Waterloo Updates and Rumours

[plam]

Here's a good quote about workslop:

Here’s how this happens. As AI tools become more accessible, workers are increasingly able to quickly produce polished output: well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code. But while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.

Also:

Yet a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies. So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return. Why?

Source: https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-wor...oductivity

(And using ChatGPT as a search engine is a terrible idea, since it doesn't care about facts.)