The elephant in the room is getting bigger every day.

Two years ago, nine press releases in a hundred were written by a machine. Today it is nearly half. On 4 August, Oracle became the first big company to look at that curve and shut a door.

Picture a Tuesday morning. Something lands in your inbox. It is tidy. Well spaced. The notes explaining the tricky part are correct. Everything about it says a colleague sat down, thought hard and solved the problem.

Two hours later you are still fixing it.

Not because it was obviously wrong. Because it was confidently, plausibly, beautifully wrong in three places. Finding them took longer than writing the thing yourself would have.

There is a word for this now

Stanford and BetterUp call it Workslop.

Work that looks polished, contains nothing, then hands the actual thinking to whoever opens it next.

Stanford and BetterUp asked 1,150 office workers. Four in ten had been sent some that month, each costing the receiver nearly two hours.

BambooHR counted the wider bill in September: twenty working days a year, per person, spent fixing what the machine produced. A month of every employee's year. It appears in no budget, on no plan and in nobody's objectives.

Watch where the time goes. The sender left early. The receiver paid, in hours that show up on no report. Nothing got faster.

The work did not disappear. It moved to a desk where nobody was counting.

There is a second not so visible consequence. Of the people who received this stuff, Forty-Two percent (42%) trusted the colleague who sent it less afterwards. More than a third quietly downgraded their view of that person's intelligence. So the trade is this. You save an hour. Your colleagues decide you are not as sharp as they thought. Nobody tells you. You go on sending it.

Now look at the curve

In August 2024, nine percent (9%) of corporate press releases were written or part-written by a machine. By July 2025, twenty-two (22%) . By this summer, forty-five (45%). That is from an analysis of roughly 350,000 releases published on 1 September. Press releases are simply the corner of the world somebody bothered to measure.

Your inbox is not exempt from that curve. Two years ago you could assume a document was human unless something felt off. That assumption has quietly expired. Most organisations are still running on it.

One company did something about it

On 4 August, Oracle banned AI-written work from Java. Not restricted. Not "subject to review". Banned. Code, documents, emails, the lot. Write a hundred lines with a machine, hand-edit a few. Still banned.

Everyone reading this as an engineering story has missed it. Oracle did not ban AI because it writes bad code. Bad code is easy. Bad code fails. Review catches it every day, which is what review is for.

Oracle banned it because the output arrives looking good. Their own words: it appears credible and later turns out to be wrong.

The danger is not the rubbish. The danger is the polish. Rubbish gets caught in nine minutes. A confident, plausible, well-formatted answer gets approved in nine. Nobody finds out for a year.

Why Java gets to be smug

Software has something most work does not. Machines that check it. The code runs or it does not, so the distance between looking right and being right stays small.

Now picture a board summary. Formatted. Confident. Spelled correctly. Nothing on earth checks it. No machine reads the sentence claiming the market is consolidating and asks whether that is true. It just reads as - finished.

Oracle had it easy

Here is the part that should worry you.

Java sits underneath the world's banks, hospitals and airlines. When Oracle's people asked what happens if unverified work gets in, the answer was immediate and enormous. Nobody needed persuading.

The elephant was the size of a building and everyone in the room could see it.

That is not your situation.Your elephant is still small.

A slightly-off paragraph in a supplier summary. A number in a board pack that nobody traced, small enough that raising it in a meeting would make you look difficult.

Which is precisely why it grows. It is cheapest to deal with while nobody can see it. By the time everybody can, it is standing in the middle of the room and has been for two years.

The gap in the bottom row is where workslop lives. It is also where most senior decisions get made.

The decision nobody is making

Oracle spends billions on AI. Then Oracle bars the stuff from Java. Plenty of people online called that hypocrisy and moved on, pleased with themselves.

They are wrong. Oracle didn't ban a technology. Instead, they set a boundary for one specific area where the Elephant isn't allowed. It has to stop at that door.

Copying Oracle's answer will not help you. Their room is not your room. Their ban would be absurd applied to most of what your people do.

The old saying gives us an elephant that everyone sees and nobody mentions. Ours is worse behaved. This one writes the reports, sends the memos and passes the review.

It is cheapest to remove while nobody can see it. It is impossible to remove by the time everybody can. Somewhere between those two points sits a decision. Nobody is going to make it for you.

How many documents crossed your desk this week that nobody could verify?

Oracle counted theirs. Nobody has counted yours.