The Digital Contrarian™

Ryan Levesque

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The Digital Contrarian™

Ryan Levesque

Issue #103

| The Digital Contrarian™

Workslop, Resentment, & The State of AI…

Workslop, Resentment, & The State of AI (A Lesson on What Not to Do...)

Ryan Levesque

12 min read

-

June 6, 2026

We’re officially half-way through 2026…

Can you believe it?!

And over last few weeks…

I’ve been taking you deep behind the scenes of my upcoming book launch for Return to Real...

But today I want to do something different.

I want to zoom all the way up.

Because Return to Real wasn’t written in a vacuum. It was written in response to a handful of forces showing up in the world right now. And one of those forces sits at the very center of the book…

The tension in our relationship with AI.

And now that we’ve just officially crossed the halfway point of 2026.

This feels like the right moment to step back and take a state-of-the-union look at where AI actually stands…

And why I believe the Return to Real movement is gaining so much momentum right now…

(More on that in a bit.)

1 | The Undercurrent of AI Resentment

Let me start with a number.

Did you know that than 2 out of 5 recent college graduates, ages 22 to 27, are underemployed as we speak?

Right now, 42% of young college grads are working jobs that don’t require the degree they just spent four years and a small fortune earning.

Instead, they’re doing things like:

Ringing up groceries. Working at a coffee shop. Driving for Uber or Lyft.

And it isn’t just the scarcity of good jobs.

Only 19% of recent grads say it’s a good time to find quality work right now. (For reference, three years ago, that number was north of 70%.)

So where is all of this economic frustration getting pointed?

Increasingly, toward AI.

In [Issue #101]: Back to the Drawing Board we looked at the wave of recent college commencement speeches met with boos whenever the “promise” of artificial intelligence was mentioned…

Now to be fair…

Economists are split on how much of this is truly AI versus a frozen entry-level hiring market. The honest answer is that it’s probably some of both.

But to a 24-year-old college grad who can’t get a job, AI is a reasonable scapegoat.

And what’s emerging is an undercurrent of resentment building among young people toward all things AI generated.

There’s a sense that the rules changed mid-game. That the technology they were told to embrace may be the same one closing doors in front of them.

This resentment is one of the reasons the Return to Real movement is gaining so much momentum right now among young people…

But it also has to do with…

2 | The Great AI Disconnect.

Now here’s the strange part.

You might expect that resentment toward AI to be matched by disappointment inside the companies betting big on AI.

It’s actually the opposite… At least at the top.

Because there’s an enormous gap right now between how the entrepreneurs and executives running companies see AI…

And how the people doing the actual work perceive it.

A friend of mine forwarded me a deep dive from Goldman Sachs Investment Research this week that laid out all the data in black and white.

When you ask workers how much time AI saves them each week, the single most common answer is… none.

Ask the executives at those very same companies, and they are convinced AI is saving them huge chunks of time every week.

The distance between those two groups is the widest divide in the entire dataset.

(Take another look at that diagram above to see what I mean…)

The hard numbers line up with what the workers are saying:

A widely-cited MIT report found that despite $30 to $40 billion poured into enterprise AI, 95% of organizations are seeing zero return on it.
The St. Louis Fed found that workers report AI saving them about 1.6% of their working hours. (Not 16%. One-point-six.)
And a study from the economist Nick Bloom and his colleagues found that of the firms using AI, 89% saw no measurable impact at all. The average productivity bump across all of them came in at less than a quarter of one percent.

So there is a massive disconnect between the boardroom story and the cubicle reality.

Which raises the obvious question:

If AI is as powerful as we all know it can be… where is all of that promised productivity actually going?

I think at least part of the answer has a name.

3 | Enter.... "Workslop"

Last week, I was feeling a bit spicy, and posted something a bit heated Facebook:

“Do NOT send me your 25 page report generated by Claude / ChatGPT and ask me to ‘please review and let me know what you think?’ Because I will just upload that [crap] into my Claude account and ask it to spit out a 25 page response with ‘what I think’ for you to read in response.”

Based on the dozens of comments that came through on what I thought was otherwise a quick throwaway post…

It turns out I’m far from alone.

Mike Kim, a client and fellow creator I’ve written about here in this publication, inspired this post based on an actual clause he inserted into his client contracts forbidding this practice.

I think the post landed on something that a lot of us have been experiencing but for which we might not necessarily have a word to describe:

That moment of frustration when you open a document/presentation/report from someone (client, partner, employee, contractor, etc.) that was clearly created with the help of AI and which looks professional and put together on the surface…

Only to experience a major letdown when you take the time to review the substance of what’s inside.

That phenomenon has a name.

The researchers behind a Harvard Business Review study that’s been getting more and more attention recently call it workslop.

Workslop (different from the more commonly-used “AI Slop”) is AI-generated work that looks polished on the surface. Well formatted. Valuable at first glance.

But when you peel away the next layer down, it’s rife with issues and gaps and very clear that there hasn’t been sufficient effort, editing, or thinking put into the output.

In fact, if you’ve experienced some variation of this…

Congratulations, you’ve been workslopped!

Here’s how the HBR team describes the way it 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.

The insight I think is most worth noting is in that final idea:

Workslop shifts the burden downstream.

It takes the effort the sender should have spent thinking… and hands it to YOU the receiver, who now has to decode it, correct it, or redo the whole thing from scratch.

In other words, the work doesn’t vanish. It just moves. From the person who generated it to the person who receives it.

Here’s where it goes from mildly annoying to costing us something of real financial consequence.

That same study put real numbers on it:

The average person now burns nearly two hours dealing with each single instance of workslop received.

So, in other words, there is effectively a Workslop Tax, and anytime you receive something like this from someone who created it, you’re the one paying the tax.

The productivity AI creates at the top is getting eaten, on the way down, by the cost of reviewing and later fixing all the slop it generates along the way.

And I think it’s a big part of the answer to that question from a moment ago:

Why is there such a gap between the productivity gains we should be seeing from AI and what’s actually materializing?

The Workslop Tax is offsetting a major portion of those gains, and is eating away at the margins.

Which brings us to…

4 | The Return to Real Movement Is Gaining Steam

Put it all together.

The resentment among young people. The disconnect between the c-suite execs and the employees doing the work. The rising tax of cleaning up artificial workslop.

And you start to see why so many people are hungry for something real again.

And this trend is showing up in a real way.

For example…

Earlier this week, a friend of mine, Dr. Mike Green, sent me an episode of My First Million this week, the show hosted by Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.

In this episode, Sam and Shaan are working through the business opportunities emerging in response to a world saturated with screens and AI…

And then, right around the 41-minute mark, Shaan says the phrase out loud:

“Return to the real.”

I had to rewind it to make sure I heard him right.

(Here’s the link in case you’re curious: https://youtu.be/5P6k92gr96c?si=K_-Typ16wqC4Rku_&t=2449)

I’ve since had a wave of people have send me this same clip.

It’s really cool to see this language – Return to Real – begin entering the mainstream.

The idea is in the air…

People are grasping for ways to describe what they’re feeling, and the words are starting to take shape.

Which brings us to…

5 | Quick Update on the Book & What's Coming...

All of this momentum has made for one of the most productive weeks I’ve had on the book itself. In the last week, we’ve been able to:

Book studio dates for my upcoming audiobook recording session…
Schedule a video crew to come capture footage here at the farm…
Experience a breakthrough on my op-ed piece (still WIP…)
Get the line edit back to my editor for a final pass on the last few commas…
Narrow our printer and fulfillment vendors down to the final shortlist…
Lock in the dates for the 2026 Return to Real Farm Mastermind I’m hosting on our farm as part of this book launch (Which, if you’re interested, you can get onto the priority list to be notified about here…)

Things are firing on all cylinders, with still more work to be done, but I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel…

(And boy is it a long tunnel :-)

Which brings us to…

Interested in joining one of my live in-person events?

Join the priority list to be notified when I announce my next intimate, in-person gathering or event.

6 | A Farm Update for the Agro-Curious...

The book is not the only thing in full swing around here.

On the farm, things are cranking…

The tomatoes and basil are finally out of the greenhouse and into the ground.

The kitchen garden greens are pumping.

The carrots have just broken ground. The potatoes and onions are humming. And our strawberries, a brand new enterprise for us this year, have started to take hold.

The cows are out on pasture loving life. And the turkeys will soon be joining them.

There’s something fitting about writing a whole issue on AI slop after feeding the pigs and covered in, well, actual slop…

(I desperately need a shower right now…)

But this is the real the book is actually about.

7 | Quick Ask Before I Go.

As part of my upcoming Book Launch Tour, I will be in the great city of Nashville, Tennessee this August 4-5, recording a handful of in-person podcast interviews.

I’ve got room for ONE or TWO more.

If that’s you, or someone you know who hosts a show that you think would be a great fit for a Return to Real conversation, please SEND ME AN EMAIL and let’s talk :-)

And BTW – if you’re NOT in Nashville, but have a podcast that you’d love to have a conversation around Return to Real, please let me know as well!

We’re starting to lock in my interview schedule over the next few months, and I’m planning on only doing interviews across a few short windows…

* * *

Okay!

That’s what I’ve got for this week…

Have a GREAT rest of your weekend.

Remember to hug the ones you love.

And please… for the love of all things…

Do not be the one to sling AI workslop into the world.

Until next week,

Ryan :-)

P.S. If you’ve been Workslopped – I’d love to hear your story. Shoot me an email to let me know. Funniest one wins a prize ;-)

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