Freelancers are getting buried with ‘soulless’ AI slop cleanup: ‘It’s a shame we need to do it’

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.

“It was just so soulless,” said Lisa, who now focuses on “human-made designs”.

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. Listings for freelance jobs exposed to automation fell 21% in the eight months after ChatGPT launched and image-creation gigs dropped 17% after AI image generators arrived, according to a 2025 study published in the academic journal Management Science. And those losses have continued, according to a 2026 study.

Meanwhile, more workers are turning to freelance work as companies cut staff and hire less, intensifying competition. The average project on Freelancer.com drew 54 bids in 2025, up 8% from the year before, according to the site’s annual report.

But as companies cut costs, they’re changing the nature of freelance assignments, from requests for creative work to sprucing up AI output. Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com, said the cleanup work is often commissioned by small companies and entrepreneurs using AI to produce a first pass, only to run into problems they don’t have the expertise to solve.

“[AI output] needs a human to turn it into something polished that can actually be used,” he said. The time and money saved on the first draft can be eaten up by the “incredibly time-consuming” work of preparing it for commercial use.

The rise of the AI cleanup crews

For some freelancers, cleanup is taking up a growing share of their workload and traditional creative projects are becoming harder to find.

Todd Van Linda, a full-time freelance illustrator in Florida, began taking AI cleanup gigs in 2023 as his usual work drawing illustrations, video game art and architectural plans became less steady. The work typically involves filtering out visual noise, improving resolution, and hunting for glitches like an extra toe.

“Money”, Van Linda said of his motivation. “The jobs were there to be done.”

Though some clients expect AI cleanup to cost less than original work, Van Linda won’t lower his rates. When one prospective client offered about $500 to repair 13 to 15 AI-generated illustrations for a children’s book, with the expectation that each should take about 15 minutes, he turned it down. He said projects can take between a few hours of work to days depending on the scope. His rate is $65 an hour and “doesn’t go down from there”, he said.

For Kym Dunbar, a freelance writer and editor based in Australia, AI cleanup now accounts for about 60% of her workload, as writing work like blogs and website copy have dwindled. As a result, Dunbar said her monthly earnings from writing original content have fallen to roughly a third of what she made during the pandemic.

Dunbar stumbled into cleanup work in 2024, when a client asked her to revise an AI-generated article. She quickly learned to spot recurring problems, from repetitive language and awkward paragraph structures to a lack of emotional nuance. Since then, she has worked on about 40 AI-generated nonfiction books, longform articles and technical papers.

“There’s a lot less good projects available for writers and editors these days,” Dunbar said.

But “cleanup” can understate how much work is involved.

Nathan McConnell, a multimedia editor who freelances on top of his full-time job, started editing AI-generated videos in 2023. His work has ranged from removing reflections from AI real estate videos to fixing robotic voiceovers and malformed 3D models. The requests have increased from two or three projects in 2023 to eight to 10 so far this year, he said.

One client brought him roughly 100 AI-generated images of humanoid animals for a tarot deck riddled with extra fingers, two left feet and other mistakes. McConnell spent two to three hours repairing each image in Photoshop, expecting the project to take nearly two weeks to finish. But after making the first 10 cards, he called the project off because of health issues and constant changes requested from his “persnickety” client.

Not everything that lands in McConnell’s inbox can be saved, he said. That could look like videos where the physics feel off, like shadows falling the wrong way, or animations that repurpose another creator’s work without permission.

“I’ve told a client before that it’s ‘too’ slop,” McConnell said. “There’s no way I can fix this.”

While McConnell and Van Linda would rather make original work, not everyone finds fixing AI outputs dispiriting. Dunbar considers it “interesting” and “challenging”, and takes satisfaction in turning a weak draft into polished prose.

What troubles her is that people increasingly see AI not as a tool, but as the “be-all and end-all” of the creative process.

“I just feel it’s a shame we need to do it,” Dunbar said.

It’s unclear whether cleaning up AI-generated slop will remain a viable source of work.

Dunbar isn’t convinced it will. She believes much of the work humanizing AI could dry up within five to 10 years as models improve and allow businesses to generate usable content themselves.

McConnell sees it differently, arguing that AI still needs to be “babysat” to catch mistakes an untrained eye might miss, from logos that violate brand guidelines to objects that appear and disappear in videos. “We need people [to fix] problems that AI is creating,” he said.

But Van Linda is already creating a different path. After he stopped taking AI cleanup gigs late last year, he has seen more clients, some of whom have been dissatisfied with AI, seeking original, hand-drawn work.

“Quite frankly, this kind of thing has gotten extremely distasteful to me,” he said about AI cleanup work.

Though Lisa, the freelance graphic designer, updated her profile to say she no longer works with AI-generated images, she still gets requests to edit them. She occasionally takes cleanup gigs for clients who come to her after getting poor results with AI. But some clients “straight up lie” and pass off the images as original creations.

“They say ‘I don’t use AI,’ but there’s a “[Google] Gemini logo on the bottom,” she said.

But just in case AI makes her job obsolete, she has a plan. Lisa has begun returning to the canvases, watercolors and other physical art she practiced before she pursued a career in graphic design. She predicts that within “another year or two”, AI will be able to do logo and packaging design as well as she can, leaving only “the best of the best” able to make a living.

“I don’t know if I’m good enough to survive the digital stuff,” she said.