Employers have a new message for workers using AI to write: Stop the slop.
Fed up with bloated and confusing content, from project proposals to status updates, bosses are instituting policies that outline where reasonable internal AI use ends, and overreliance begins. They say merely urging workers to curb the behavior hasn't been enough.
A formal policy creates a shared "touchpoint" rather than requiring leaders to repeatedly explain what is expected, said Clare Jones, CEO of the travel-app maker Polarsteps.
The Amsterdam-based company, founded in 2015, released a set of principles earlier this year on when and how its roughly 100 employees should use AI for internal writing. (Most of the consumer-facing copy in its app is produced by professional in-house writers, Jones said.)
Polarsteps' expectations include, for example, disclosing when staff have used AI and ensuring the final copy reflects their own reasoning and voice. Jones said employees can still use AI to brainstorm and draft, but they are expected to apply their own critical thinking before sharing the result.
How slop spread
Driving the crackdown has been a gradual increase in time-wasting slop in the years since OpenAI kicked off the generative AI revolution with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.
A late 2025 survey from BetterUp and Stanford's Social Media Lab found that 40% of 1,150 full-time US desk workers had received AI slop from a coworker in the preceding month. Respondents said dealing with each instance took nearly two hours on average.
"The critical mass is there now," said Jessica Zwaan, vice president of people strategy and operations at the AI-powered HR software company Leapsome. "Everyone is just producing large amounts of writing."
At a recent internal meeting, she said she spent more time reading the prep materials than she did in the meeting itself. "I don't know if I've ever wanted a clear sentence longer," she said. "Longer is not better."
Zwaan theorizes that workers in general are misusing AI because they've been told it is an imperative, and may worry that sending brief notes instead of lengthy AI-generated documents will make them look lazy.
"A lot of people associate productivity with volume, and actually, productivity is clarity," she said.
Leapsome's AI writing policy was rolled out in mid-August and instructs its 130 employees in Berlin and New York to stand behind what they say, focus on clarity, and be mindful of the length.
"If a short prompt produced a long document, it's not worth reading for the same reason it wasn't worth writing," it says.
Blaming AI for ambiguous write-ups is also discouraged.
"'AI wrote it' isn't an answer if someone asks what you meant," the guideline states. "Every word should be something you back."
'Just ignore that'
AI slop has become so ubiquitous that techies have coined a nickname for perpetrators: "meat proxies." The term was popularized by German software Niklas Gruhn in an August 3 blog post and refers to those who share unchecked AI outputs.
A formal policy can help minimize that dynamic by making it less awkward for workers to challenge colleagues' AI-generated writing, said Sophie Alpert, a lead engineer at Clay, a sales and marketing automation platform. She wrote the company's policy, which was first shared with its roughly 100-person engineering team in mid-June before being rolled out to all 550 of its employees in early August.
"I wanted to create space for people to push back without it seeming like a personal judgment," she said.
The new rules at Clay require employees to stand behind every idea and sentence in their documents and to make their writing worth reading.
"Any extra time that readers need to spend to understand what you meant incurs a multiplicative cost on the team's time," it says. "Conversely, if you spend extra time to make your document clear and concise before sending it, you are paying a one-time cost that every reader will benefit from."
Alpert said she was inspired to take action after colleagues sent her five overtly AI-generated documents in one week. When she asked them to explain some confusing parts, she said she was told, "just ignore that."
In a sign of how broadly Alpert's response resonates, a LinkedIn post about it by Clay's CEO, Varun Anand, went viral last month. It had nearly 10,000 reactions and more than 700 reposts as of September 3.
Guardrails, not bans
The AI writing policies at Polarsteps, Leapsome, and Clay don't amount to an outright AI ban. Instead, the standards are aimed at preventing workers from passing off unexamined AI output as their own thinking — or burdening colleagues with it.
So far, bosses behind them say the reactions they've seen from workers have been mostly positive.
"I think a lot of people were like, 'Thank goodness someone's doing something about this,'" said Zwaan, adding that some employees asked the company to go further by restricting AI in employee-to-employee messages and marketing copy.
At Polarsteps, the new guidance is already having a positive effect.
"We're getting so much human content now, which is really lovely," said Jones.
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Sarah E. Needleman covers leadership and the workplace for Business Insider.Previously, she was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal for more than two decades, covering technology companies, entrepreneurship, and recruiting.In 2022, Sarah received an honorable mention with WSJ colleagues for their coverage of workplace misconduct at Activision Blizzard from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.Sarah graduated from Rutgers University in 1997 with a bachelor's degree in journalism. She lives with her husband, daughter, and fur child (an Australian labradoodle) in northern New Jersey.
