For a while now, we’ve been seeing companies that fired a bunch of their human workers in favor of artificial intelligence move to recoup some of that flesh-and-blood labor.
Now, that push has resulted in a new line of gig work: slop fixer-uppers, who get paid to improve AI-generated art, writing, and code — by making it less, well, sloppy.
In an interview with NBC News, longtime freelance illustrator Lisa Carstens said fixing AI-generated logos, many of which have fuzzy lines and garbled text, now constitutes much of her work.
Sometimes the logos are designed well enough, the Spain-based illustrator told NBC, that she doesn’t have to do much work to get them into gear. Other times, the companies that hire her need an entire redraw that, somehow, remains true to the contours of the original AI version she was given — and those often end up taking longer than if she’d simply cooked up the design herself.
“There’s people that are aware AI isn’t perfect, and then there’s people that come to you angry because they didn’t manage to get it done themselves with AI,” Carstens told NBC. “And you kind of have to be empathetic. You don’t want them to feel like idiots. Then you have to fix it.”
It’s not just artists, either. Kiesha Richardson, a freelance writer by trade, has started taking on gigs editing AI-penned copy despite how demoralizing it may feel.
“I have some colleagues who are adamant about not working with AI,” Richardson, who’s based in Georgia, told NBC. “But I’m like, ‘I need money. I’m taking [the gig].'”
These days, half the gigs the freelancer takes are rewrite jobs on AI-generated content, much of which doesn’t “look remotely human at all,” Richardson said. Beyond correcting common AI hallmarks like the overuse of em-dashes and overused phrases like “delve” and “deep dive,” the writer also finds herself having to do her own research to fix even the stuff that’s nominally legible, because chatbots tend to not explain things in adequate detail.
If such rewrites netted a similar fee to traditional content writing jobs, it would be one thing — but as Richardson noted, companies pay less for cleaning up AI copy because they presume it’s easier and less time-consuming, when it fact it often requires as much mental labor as content she had written herself.
Still, the same mindset behind companies firing real-life employees for AI exists behind the folks tasked with cleaning up AI content a contract basis — and we don’t need to know what Richardson or Carstens makes on an average project to know it’s way less than what the people who used to work at those companies made before they were kicked to the curb.
“I am a bit concerned because people are using AI to cut costs, and one of those costs is my pay,” Richardson told NBC. “But at the same time, they find out that they can’t really do it without humans. They’re not getting the content that they want from AI, so hopefully we’ll stick around a little longer.”
Slowly but surely, it appears that companies who insisted on AI investments are figuring out that the tech has serious pain points. Harsh Kumar, an India-based app and web developer, told NBC he’s seeing more and more clients who are foregoing so-called “vibe coding” — a very goofy word to describe using AI prompting to write code instead of, you know, actually writing it yourself — for flesh-and-blood devs.
Of course, his clients only realized this after hiring him to fix projects that either don’t work or are ludicrously insecure. From fixing a company’s chatbot that gave inaccurate answers and leaked system details to rebuilding an AI-powered content recommendation function that also gave crappy summaries and exposed sensitive data, Kumar’s projects sound like an exercise in futility.
Like Richardson, though, Kumar sees a light at the end of the AI tunnel.
“I’m still confident that humans will be required for long-term projects,” he told NBC. “At the end of the day, humans were the ones who developed AI.”
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