Unsloppable: How to Leverage AI Without Outsourcing Your Thinking

Use generative AI at work without producing slop or losing trust

Unsloppable: How to Leverage AI Without Outsourcing Your Thinking is a practical guide to using ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for better business writing and clearer thinking. Learn to create emails, reports, proposals, and presentations that reflect your expertise and earn your readers’ trust. Former Google Cloud AI director Valliappa Lakshmanan, PhD, explains why large language models produce generic prose and invented facts―and what you can do about it. Through worked examples and practical checklists, he shows you how to avoid AI slop: content that looks polished but lacks the substance, accuracy, or judgment your readers need.

Unsloppable opens with a six-item prompt checklist designed to ensure generated content reflects the writer's own point of view rather than generic output. Subsequent chapters cover tool selection, avoiding common rookie mistakes, owning the narrative across long-form content, curating context, and synthesizing multiple sources. The book concludes with a recommended end-to-end workflow for creating content that balances productivity gains against the risk of AI slop.

Readers will also find:

• A clear framework for balancing trust and productivity when integrating generative AI into everyday professional communications and deliverables
• Guidelines for writing better AI prompts using six essential elements: audience, purpose, task, viewpoint, format, and constraints
• Suggestions on AI tools for your work that enable you to customize AI to your voice by suppling the sources, context, and instructions they need
• An approach that uses AI as a sparring partner to explore alternatives, challenge assumptions, and develop recommendations you can defend
• Ways to check facts and citations, spot AI hallucinations, and catch weak reasoning before it reaches your readers
• A repeatable workflow that matches the effort to the stakes, from routine updates to presentations that shape important decisions

Written for professionals without a technical background―including business leaders, lawyers, policymakers, healthcare professionals, educators, journalists, and consultants―Unsloppable equips anyone who uses generative AI at work with the specific methods needed to produce trustworthy content and avoid the reputational cost of AI slop.