"Slop Grenades": Shopify CEO Who Pushed Staff to Use AI Is Now Horrified by What He's Wrought

Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke is getting a first-hand look at the AI-workplace revolution, and it isn’t a pretty sight.

New reporting by Fortune revealed the disastrous results of Shopify’s all-out scramble to embrace AI nearly a year ago. After telling workers that using AI tools is a “baseline expectation” in the workplace, Lütke is now changing his tune as workers spew out AI-generated emails, memos, and code without double-checking it beforehand.

“We call those ‘slop grenades’ that people toss at each other,” Lütke said in an interview on the Knowledge Project podcast. “That’s definitely a bad thing.”

The CEO further explained that the initiative incentivized workers to “go nuts” on AI, leading to a deluge of AI generated slop.

“You don’t really read it, and now it has to be reviewed by your colleagues, and they are like, ‘this doesn’t look right,'” he complained. “You’re just letting AI do the work for you.”

As ironic as it may be for the once-AI-happy Shopify exec, he’s far from alone. An April survey of 1,150 office workers found that 40 percent had encountered a phenomenon known as “workslop,” or AI-generated content that looks professional on the surface but lacks any actual substance.

Estimates found workers already waste 3.4 hours a month cleaning up the AI schlock, amounting to a monthly loss of $8.1 million for a workplace with 10,000 employees.

Another survey from earlier in September found that negative sentiments around AI in workplace have exploded over the past few years, with the majority of workers now expressing negative attitudes toward the tech.

Whatever way you slice it, it’s clear that AI is not a catch-all for workplace productivity — an obnoxious lesson Shopify’s Lütke had to learn the hard way.

More on AI: AI Really Is Eviscerating Entry-Level Jobs, New Data Shows