Humans Hired to Clean Up AI Mistakes in 2025 – NBC News
Humans Hired to Clean Up AI Mistakes in 2025 – NBC News report
In today’s age of automation, human freelancers are being brought in to fix what artificial intelligence gets wrong, according to NBC News.
The same technology that was supposed to put graphic designer Lisa Carstens out of business is now keeping her busier than ever. Carstens, a longtime freelancer based in Spain, spends much of her day working with startups and individual clients looking to repair their failed attempts at AI-generated logos.
The illustrations clients bring to her are commonly littered with unclean lines and nonsensical text, and they look like a mess of pixels when blown up beyond a certain size.
“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 said. “And you kind of have to be empathetic. You don’t want them to feel like idiots. Then you have to fix it.”
Such gigs are part of a new category of work spawned by the generative AI boom that threatened to displace creative jobs: anyone can now write blog posts, produce a graphic or code an app with a few prompts, but AI content rarely makes for a satisfactory final product on its own.
The issue has reshaped the job market. Writers are asked to spruce up ChatGPT’s drafts. Artists are hired to patch up distorted AI images. Software developers are tasked with fixing buggy apps written by AI assistants.
A recent MIT report found that AI has displaced outsourced workers more than permanent employees. It also found that 95% of businesses’ generative AI pilots are getting zero return on investment.
“The core barrier to scaling is not infrastructure, regulation, or talent,” the report states. “It is learning. Most GenAI systems do not retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time.”
For Carstens, sometimes the logos clients send are well designed enough to need only a few corrections. But other times, she must redraw the entire logo from scratch while staying true to the AI-generated design — a process that can take longer than if she had created the design herself.
Fixing AI’s mistakes is not their ideal line of work, many freelancers say, as it tends to pay less than traditional gigs. But some say it is what helps pay the bills.
“That’s all you can do, is learn and adapt,” said freelance writer Kiesha Richardson. “And I have some colleagues who are adamant about not working with AI. But I’m like, ‘I need money. I’m taking it.’”
Richardson, who is based in Georgia, said half of her jobs nowadays come from clients who hire her to tweak or rewrite their AI-generated articles that “don’t look remotely human at all.”
Some flaws are easier to correct: AI’s overuse of em dashes, even where other punctuation would make more sense, or its bias toward words like “embark,” “deep dive” and “delve.” Beyond those quirks, she said, AI tends to give generic responses that don’t answer questions as thoroughly as a human would. Rewriting an article also requires doing her own research on the subject.
But many clients don’t appreciate the effort that goes into revamping poorly written AI articles. Companies often offer less pay for these gigs based on the assumption they are less demanding. Making AI sound more human can require just as much thought and creativity as writing the entire article herself, she said.
“I am a bit concerned because people are using AI to cut costs, and one of those costs is my pay,” Richardson said. “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.”
As companies continue to test AI, data provided to NBC News from freelance platforms suggests that demand for creative work is rising. Upwork reports increased demand for complex tasks such as content strategy and art direction. Over the past six months, Fiverr has seen a 250% boost in niche requests ranging from “watercolor children story book illustration” to “Shopify website design.” Freelancer also recorded growth in writing, branding, design, and video production, with requests for emotional content such as “heartfelt speeches.”
“I mean, the fastest way to get dumped is to send a love letter to your girlfriend or boyfriend and use ChatGPT to write it,” said Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer. “And it’s the same thing for brands. The market knows when something has been fully produced by AI, and there’s an immediate visceral reaction to it.”
Brands caught using AI have continued to face backlash. Last month, Guess sparked outcry online when it featured an AI-generated model in an advertisement in Vogue.
For Todd Van Linda, an illustrator and comic artist in Florida, AI art is easy to spot. If not by its telltale inconsistencies, then by the plasticine effect that defines AI-generated images across styles.
“I can look at a piece and not only tell that it’s AI, I can tell you what descriptor they used to generate it,” Van Linda said. “When it comes to, especially, independent authors, they don’t want anything to do with that because it’s so formulaic, it’s obvious. It’s like they stopped off at Walmart to get a bargain cover for their book.”
Authors come to him because AI art fails to capture the hyperspecific “vibe” of their stories. Often, they can only give him a rough idea of what they want. It becomes his job to decipher their preferences and create something that delivers the exact feeling they want to evoke.
Van Linda said he also gets approached by clients who want him to fix their AI-generated art, but he avoids those jobs because the clients are usually unwilling to pay him what his labor is worth.
“There would be more work involved in fixing those images than there would be in starting from a clean sheet of paper and doing it right, because what they have is a mismatched collection of generalities that really don’t follow what they’re trying to do,” he said. “But they’re trying to wedge the square peg into the round hole because they don’t want to spend any more money.”
The same challenge exists in more technical fields. Harsh Kumar, a web and app developer in India, said many clients had already spent their budgets on “vibe coding” tools that failed to deliver results.
But others realized that paying a human developer is worth avoiding the problems of trying to fix AI’s own faulty code. Kumar said his clients often bring him vibe-coded websites or apps that turned out unstable or unusable.
His projects have included repairing an AI-powered chatbot that gave customers inaccurate answers and leaked sensitive system details, as well as rebuilding an AI recommendation system that crashed, gave irrelevant suggestions, and exposed sensitive data.
“AI may increase productivity, but it can’t fully replace humans,” Kumar said. “I’m still confident that humans will be required for long-term projects. At the end of the day, humans were the ones who developed AI.”
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