Lisa, a freelance graphic designer based in Spain, noticed a shift in her work after the release of ChatGPT in 2022. She went from receiving slow one-off jobs creating logos and packaging to an onslaught of requests asking her to fix versions that were generated by artificial intelligence – from sharpening fuzzy images for printing to turning flawed designs into usable files. By 2025, Lisa, who asked not to be fully named to avoid solicitations, said 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.
But the grind was exhausting. Clients lowballed her;' some AI-generated designs were so flawed that she had to recreate them from scratch and she worried about being complicit in AI-driven copyright infringement. By the end of the year, she began turning those jobs down.
Lisa is part of a growing group of creative freelancers being hired to clean up AI slop, a term used to characterize low-quality, AI-generated output. As businesses use tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude to produce marketing copy, illustrations, books and videos, they are hiring creative professionals to humanize AI-generated copy, repair botched images and salvage flawed footage. The work serves as a stopgap in an increasingly challenging job market, supplementing income for those who freelance full-time or on the side.
But clients often underestimate the time and skill involved, expecting cleanup to be quick and cheap when it can require as much work as creating something original, freelancers said. And while the high volume of cleanup gigs can be lucrative, freelancers are divided over the trade-off. Some find it tedious and creatively unfulfilling, while others enjoy the challenge.
As AI improves, freelancers question how long the demand will last and where they’ll turn once the jobs dry up. For now, demand for AI cleanup work is growing. 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.
The jobs were concentrated in graphic design, followed by video editing, proofreading and content writing. Upwork saw AI remediation gigs jump 70% year over year, and Fiverr saw keyword searches for “AI cleanup” services grow more than 20 times between 2023 and 2026, according to data shared with the Guardian. The specter of AI could spell trouble for the creative freelance labor market.
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