Create a common response so that you can easily reply to their emails:

Hi [So and So]

I do not appreciate receiving emails that contain AI generated content. It wastes my time, and makes me feel like my work and time are not appreciated. If you would send the prompt that you gave to the AI instead of the AI's response to your prompt, I would appreciate it.

Moreover, I have found that AI generated emails often contain contradictory/wrong information. Because I am unable to tell which parts of this AI generated email are real and which are AI hallucinations I cannot answer it as generated.

Best of luck, Cloud

And this is the hard part. This, and only this, is the response that you send to anyone who sends you AI generated garbage.

Additionally, you should go to your boss and write a formal complaint about this.

Here are several options that I have used when faced with lots of undesirable work being dumped on me:

Let your boss decide

At the end of the day your boss needs to be aware of how you are spending your work day. If you are spending/wasting let's say 50% of it processing random slop AI requests that are not contributing to the bottom line, then they should be informed.

Your boss can in turn raise this problem to the bosses in the other departments that are responsible for this increased work load and from there leadership will hopefully make a decision on who should be handling what.

Pit requestors against other requestors

Allow only a small numbers of hours per day to handle AI slop requests, let's say 2 hours for the sake of this example. It becomes first come first serve, and once you hit that limit the rest have to wait till the following workday.

This approach works best when paired with some kind of ticket system that is public. Each request gets a work ticket with who requested it and the entire AI slop is attached to the ticket.

Then as people complain you direct them to the long list of other requests and their requestors who are taking up all your precious time. The goal being to get the requestors to fight with each other claiming their work is higher priority until some kind of arrangement comes down that limits the amount of AI slop they can dump on you.

Ignore the requests until they follow up

Create a Follow-Up folder in Outlook and take all those random requests as they came in and toss them in there and ignore them. For some (hopefully small) percentage of them people will send a follow up email requesting status on a previous request. At that point work the request. It is amazing how many requests that there will be no follow up on since the request never had any value to begin with.

I'd put the ball back in their court. This is more polite/toned down language than this answer here, which would be more suitable if this is coming from much higher up in the company.

"There's a lot of information here and I don't have the availability to read and process it all, can you please indicate the most important question so that I can get back to you with the most critical information?"

And, optionally "If you need me to look through everything, I'd need to confirm with [manager] the priority of this relative to the other work I have to do."

The goal is to make the person read it themselves and figure out themselves what is the most important, instead of smearing the AI response off to you. You're also highlighting that the amount of time it would take is significant, and including your boss' approval in the use of that time.

Ignore the fact that the content was generated by AI, as you would have the same problem with this type of content if a human had written it. Just criticize the content:

"This request is disorganized, I can't tell what the problem is or what information you are asking me to provide. Before I spend a significant amount of time on it, can you explain exactly what it is that you are asking me to do here? I only have a limited amount of time budgeted for answering queries from other departments, please help me use that time more effectively."

I absolutely agree with Anketam's answer, and will add one more possibility.

Whenever a request arrives that takes more than two minutes, reply with a request for a booking number, or for whatever else allows you to charge your time against a cost center or a budget.

This creates visibility into how much of your time is taken up with things like this. (Notice I am writing "taken", not "wasted".) Most requestors will not reply with a booking number, a win from your point of view. If the email is indeed important, then people will be happy to provide budget for your time.

This is the way to deal with any help vampire, whether AI- or NI (Natural or No Intelligence)-driven - which should really not make a difference. At some time, it may make sense to analyze whether it takes you more time to respond to AI slop or to regular slop. But let the people making the requests worry about this.

If people come back with a whine instead of a booking number, "awww, please, just this one time?", loop in your manager. "Boss, X is asking me to do Y without a booking number. I expect this to take Z hours of my time. Should I do this, and against which time code?" Don't forget to cc the requestor when you forward their mail to your manager with this question.

Of course, nothing here prevents you from doing occasional favors to people. But help vampires need to be put in their place. And GenAI has given them a new pair of fangs. (I really need to GenAI-create an image to go with that metaphor...)

I'm going to recommend something that has been a pet peeve of mine, because I think it might actually be a good communication strategy here.

Once you see that this is the kind of request you received, skim it quickly to identify one question that looks relevant. Respond with a short answer to that. Just send it, and let them follow up with additional questions if they actually have them. Put the ball back in their court. Don't mention what you didn't understand, unless you think it's critical to the task.

When people respond in this way to a well thought out email with multiple important questions in it, it's frustrating. But one of your problems here is that you don't know what the important questions are, hidden behind the "wall of text". Make a quick guess, respond with something that might be helpful, and let them do the work of highlighting what's important to them, if they wish.

This might not stop them from sending these sorts of messages, but it might help you work together.

This is an aggregate of other excellent answers, to somewhat address not only your specific scenario, but also to cover some other aspects.

First of all, talk with your manager about how these AI slop emails are disrupting your work, and establish some form of prioritization. After that, consider these requests as very big, very complex and very long unscheduled and not prioritized projects, as they are, and respond with something as:

Hi,

The text sent is very long. The length of it and overall structure indicates that it will take a long time to analyse it, make corrections, and then answer or clarify any questions it contains.

If is the case in your line of work, as suggested by Stephan Kolassa answer, add:

Please reply with a booking number to a [project budget][cost center].

If not:

I will later talk with my boss about prioritization of this task before taking it.

And finally:

There are other requests like this already waiting for review, so it may take a while before I can reply, as I can only spend a limited amount of time doing unscheduled reviews of complex subjects. But if there are other short and specific questions, I can reply faster.

Simple, short, polite, and informative.

Then, after sending the reply, immediately archive the received email/conversation in a very specifically named folder, called "Non prioritized external projects". Every week or so, or when the free minute mentioned in the request finally presents itself, you open this folder to pull some not prioritized work stashed here.

Continue the conversation

The sensible answer is to communicate this to them, I have and the response was along the lines of "AI is our future and it saves me time" (of course in exchange, it costs me a lot of time!)

This is the start of a dialogue!

Due to how eloquent AI can be, most people don't realize how nonsensical the content sometimes is. They may not even know what the term "AI slop" means; they may just assume that it is just a term used by people who hate "the future".

Continue the conversation by gauging if you are both on the same page as to what "AI slop" is.

It might help if you generate AI slop about something they are well versed in. For example, if they are marketing people, have the AI write what seems like a very well-written guide to marketing, but it is actually nonsense. This shouldn't be a "gotcha", but just presented as a way to explain the technical limitations of AI.

There are only so many hours in the workday. There is also only so much that can be done in those hours.

Communicate this to the person who pays your salary. Inform them that these emails are distracting you from what you understood to be your actual work purpose.

Then ask your boss, there should be a discussion on whether your work purpose should change to answering emails with essays several pages long, or does your boss want the work you do to continue as usual?

Don't make it confrontational, don't mention the fact that the essay emails are AI-generated. That will make you look like not a team player. let it be like water off a duck's back. You can spend half your day answering emails if that is what your employer wants you to do, but that will distract you from what you understand to be your main job.

Answering emails is probably the number one productivity killer in the workplace, but if your boss is OK with your productivity taking a nose dive to do more emails, take the money and run with it.

Give them short, direct, clearly non-AI responses.

The polite AI formulations can be normally reduced to short and direct ones. Do this reduction in your mind, and answer it politely, but similarly directly.

Example:

Dear Cloud, ... [an A/4 page text about that they can not elevate the sculpture to the roof because it is too heavy]

Your answer:

Dear Mr. Mover, thanks, no problem. How about renting a crane?

Btw, you are coming here on the "cloud" name, I think you have in the reality not so many problem with the AI-only talk.

I am also thinking, probably their reason is not only that they are fuctionally illiterate, but also that they fear, they write something badly. In my experience, such workplaces quickly develop into a toxic direction.

I usually reply simply with 'Here is a polite but dismissive answer'

I usually do not answer emails of work colleagues if a short video/phone call would answer their questions with less effort than writing an email answer.

Senders that need an answer either call me directly or they try to message me, via the internal chat system. Usually I than call them instead of creating a written answer.

If they need a written statement because of a formality I keep the answer short, correct and on the point.