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

As more companies turn to AI, they’re hiring freelancers to cleanup its mistakes rather than create original work 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.

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