The freelancers hired to fix AI's 'soulless' output

A new category of freelance labour has quietly grown up around the limitations of artificial intelligence: workers hired not to create, but to repair. Graphic designers, writers, editors, and video producers are increasingly being commissioned to clean up AI-generated images riddled with anatomical errors, marketing copy laden with repetitive phrasing, and footage where the physics feel wrong. The work has a name among those doing it — AI slop cleanup — and, for now, demand is rising.

On Freelancer.com, a contract-work platform with more than 88 million users, job listings tagged with phrases such as "correct AI", "AI hallucination" and "AI error" rose 87% to 10,760 globally between August 2025 and June 2026, according to internal data shared with the Guardian. Upwork saw AI remediation gigs jump 70% year on year, and Fiverr reported that keyword searches for "AI cleanup" services grew more than 20 times between 2023 and 2026.

Matt Barrie, chief executive of Freelancer.com, attributed much of the demand to small companies and entrepreneurs who use AI to produce a first draft only to encounter problems they lack the expertise to resolve. AI output, he said, "needs a human to turn it into something polished that can actually be used", with the time and money saved on that first pass frequently consumed by the "incredibly time-consuming" work of preparing it for commercial use.

What the work involves

The reality of AI cleanup varies considerably in scope and tedium. Todd Van Linda, a full-time freelance illustrator in Florida, began taking such gigs in 2023 as commissions for illustrations, video-game art, and architectural plans became less steady. The work typically involves filtering out visual noise, improving resolution, and hunting for glitches such as an extra toe. He declined one project that offered roughly $500 to repair 13 to 15 AI-generated illustrations for a children's book — with the expectation that each should take about 15 minutes — arguing that projects can take between a few hours and several days. His rate is $65 an hour, he said, and "doesn't go down from there".

For Kym Dunbar, a freelance writer and editor based in Australia, AI cleanup now accounts for about 60% of her workload as demand for original blog posts and website copy has dwindled. Her monthly earnings from writing original content have fallen to roughly a third of what she made during the pandemic. She has since worked on approximately 40 AI-generated nonfiction books, longform articles, and technical papers, having learnt to spot recurring problems from repetitive language and awkward paragraph structures to a lack of emotional nuance.

Nathan McConnell, a multimedia editor who freelances alongside a full-time job, began editing AI-generated videos in 2023 and has seen requests rise from two or three projects that year to eight to ten so far in 2026. His work has ranged from removing reflections from AI real estate videos to fixing robotic voiceovers and malformed three-dimensional models. Not everything that arrives in his inbox can be saved. "I've told a client before that it's 'too' slop," he said. "There's no way I can fix this."

A stopgap in a shrinking market

The cleanup boom is unfolding against a backdrop of structural contraction in the wider freelance creative market. A 2025 study published in the academic journal Management Science found that freelance job listings exposed to automation fell 21% in the eight months after ChatGPT launched, and that image-creation gigs dropped 17% after AI image generators arrived; those losses continued into 2026, according to a subsequent study. At the same time, more workers are turning to freelance work as companies reduce headcount and hire less. The average project on Freelancer.com drew 54 bids in 2025, up 8% from the previous year, according to the site's annual report.

Lisa, a freelance graphic designer based in Spain who asked not to be fully named, said that by 2025 roughly 90% of her incoming logo and packaging design requests required cleaning up AI-generated content — work that accounted for 60% to 70% of her annual income. She ultimately stopped taking those jobs. "It was just so soulless," she said. She now focuses on what she calls human-made designs, though she still occasionally accepts cleanup work from clients who approach her after receiving poor results from AI tools. Some clients, she added, conceal the AI origin of their files, claiming the images are original even when generative AI watermarks are visible.

Opinions among freelancers on how long this form of work will last diverge sharply. Dunbar believes much of the demand for humanising AI output could dry up within five to ten years as models improve. McConnell argues that AI still requires close supervision to catch errors an untrained eye might miss, from logos that violate brand guidelines to objects that appear and disappear within a single video frame. Van Linda, who stopped taking AI cleanup gigs late last year, said he has since seen clients — some dissatisfied with AI results — return to seeking original, hand-drawn work.

Lisa has begun returning to the canvases, watercolours, and physical media she practised before entering digital design professionally, anticipating that AI will within "another year or two" be capable of performing logo and packaging work to her standard. "I don't know if I'm good enough to survive the digital stuff," she said.

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