Businesses are hiring people to clean up AI’s mistakes

Artificial intelligence can produce impressive work, but it still makes enough mistakes to create a new job market: people hired to clean up the results.

The problem has acquired its own name, “AI slop.” Businesses using tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude for advertising copy, illustrations and video are increasingly bringing in professionals to humanize the text, repair defective images and fix other flawed material.

Freelancers told the Guardian that this work can demand as much effort as creating original images and writing from scratch. Demand is rising across several platforms. On Freelancer.com, which has more than 88 million users, job listings tagged with terms such as AI correction and artificial intelligence error rose 87% worldwide between August 2025 and June 2026, reaching 10,760. The listings mainly sought graphic designers, editors, copy editors and content writers.

Upwork recorded a 70% year-on-year increase in offers for AI product correction work. Fiverr said searches for “AI cleanup” services increased twentyfold between 2023 and 2026.

Matt Barrie, chief executive of Freelancer.com, said these jobs often come from small companies and entrepreneurs who use AI to create a first draft, then face problems they do not know how to solve. “AI-generated output needs a human to turn it into something polished that can be used,” he said. The time and money saved on the first draft can instead go toward the “incredibly time-consuming” work of preparing material for commercial use.

For some freelancers, cleaning up AI slop is becoming a growing share of their work as traditional creative commissions become scarcer. The financial incentive is drawing them into assignments that can, as the article frames it, undermine their creativity. The risks of correcting defective AI-generated content remain unclear in the supplied article.

“

AI-generated output needs a human to turn it into something polished that can be used.