On one side is AI swallowing millions of jobs, and on the other is humans being hired to clean up the nonsense AI often generates, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi
This was early 2023, a few months after ChatGPT had just made the perfect superintelligence landing in our lives. A producer friend, who wanted a beat sheet of a series written into a synopsis, sent me a document he said he had gotten written.
A reading of its first paragraph was all it took to identify the writer: ChatGPT. The perfect robotic structure, excessive and often misplaced adverbs and adjectives, and the absence of indirect tense gave it away instantly. It was sloppy in its sterile perfection.
Yet, my friend asked me to take it as a base and improve it. Crunched for time, I did. I didn’t know then, but I had unwittingly participated in what would become one of the most in-demand gigs two years later: humans cleaning up AI slop.
This is the defining irony of the AI age. While AI is consuming millions of jobs, it is simultaneously creating a unique category of employment for hundreds of thousands of humans: cleaning up the mess AI makes. Designers, writers and digital artists are increasingly being hired not to create from scratch, but fix the mess AI invariably makes when tasked with complex work. What is doubly ironic is that these are often the same humans who would have been hired to create the original had AI not been brought to undercut them.
WHAT IS AI SLOP
Jack Izzo, in a Yahoo article, defines it better than any LLM can: “AI slop is the evolution of spam, in a way. Like spam, slop is low-quality content, but thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, it’s even easier to produce. Like spam, slop can grow like a weed if left unchecked, overwhelming social media feeds and leaving users unsure of what’s real and what’s not. Like spam, slop comes in many forms — posts on social media.. books on Amazon, music on Spotify, articles from less-than-reliable news outlets (and, unfortunately, some reliable outlets) and even occasionally in peer-reviewed scientific journals.”
It is the content equivalent of empty calories: visually or textually appealing, but devoid of substance, originality, or reliable meaning.
With video generation becoming as cheap and easy as creating images, the internet is being flooded with AI-generated video slop. A hyper-realistic video of a seagull staring down a French fry on a car dashboard before smashing the window to grab it generated over 140 million views. A CCTV-style video of rabbits jumping on a backyard trampoline has racked up over 200 million views on TikTok and X. So has another video of a bear doing the same. And unsurprisingly, even porn is now overflowing with AI-generated slop.
Now the bunny video had tell-tale glitches: a bunny with two heads, and another vanishing mid-bounce. These alerted the discerning viewers to its sloppy origin. But this raises a question: What if the creator had hired a VFX artist to correct the errors?
HARMS OF THE AI SLOPOCALYPSE
The dangers of AI slop are many. First and foremost, the well of misinformation that the internet has always been is now being industrialised by AI that can generate thousands of plausible-sounding articles, product reviews, or social media posts in the time it takes a person to write just one. This floods everything, burying good information under a mountain of convincing garbage. So far, we have seen the enshittification of online businesses.
However, with AI models remixing and regurgitating existing content, what we have is the enshittification of culture itself, as music playlists are already overflowing with AI-generated music, Amazon with AI-generated books, and TikTok and other social media platforms are slowly filling up with AI-made videos.
And let’s not forget that creating this garbage consumes staggering amounts of water and electricity, contributing to emissions that harm the planet. Then there are people hired to clean up AI nonsense who could have been artists in their own right, but are now relegated to digital janitorial duties, leading to frustration and burnout.
CLEANUP CREW TO THE RESCUE
And the ones saving us from the slopocalypse, irony be crucified, are now good old humans with analogue brains. The promised AI utopia of effortless creation is instead giving rise to an underclass of digital rescuers, whose job profiles are being rewritten as AI code and training changes. These roles for AI clean up specialists are cropping up across industries, especially in freelance and creative sectors where AI’s limitations are most glaring.
First and foremost are the AI content rewriters hired to rewrite AI-generated articles, blogs, and marketing content that lack nuance, emotional resonance and factual accuracy. Then there are the art fixers hired to redraw or retouch AI-generated logos, illustrations, and art. Most AI-generated images have wrapped text, symmetry that doesn’t match reality and can be pixelated. Actual graphic designers and AI artists work to restore clarity and scale. AI code debuggers are hired to patch buggy code written by the likes of GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT. These actual developers and freelance engineers are hired to test, fix and optimise AI-generated code.
AI-generated videos are glitchy and often get physics wrong, and generate random things inside frames. AI video polishers are typically VFX artists whose job is to enhance the visual coherence and thus the realism of the footage.
These roles are not about collaboration, but correction. And the cost-saving AI promised is a mirage that can’t be held without the hidden overhead of human quality control. This entire endeavour reeks of a bizarre inefficiency as machines create slop at scale, and humans are hired to clean it up at a premium.
Go to freelance platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer, and you’ll see a surging demand for human-led creativity, especially in writing, image creation, and design.
MOTHER OF ALL IRONIES
AI was supposed to replace humans. Instead, it is creating a parallel economy of human fixers: people who make synthetic content usable, relatable, real – make it feel more human. There’s another irony – AI is replacing humans in certain jobs, while also creating menial jobs for them. People who, before AI, would have become artists have been relegated to the job of cleaners, janitors, cleaning AI slop. Yes, AI is on one side revealing just how irreplaceable humans are when it comes to nuance, empathy, and storytelling, but at the cost of the humans who can do those.
The problem here, as often isn’t artificial intelligence, but natural human stupidity. AI creating slop and humans hired to clean it isn’t an inevitable tech progress outcome. No! It’s a choice arisen out of a gold rush mentality that prioritises speed, volume and cost-cutting over quality, authenticity, and truth.
The solution, hence, lies not in AI becoming more ‘intelligent’, but in humans becoming smarter and realising that humans should always be in the loop, not brought in at the end to clean up. The solution isn’t in abandoning AI, but in recalibrating our relationship with it. We must realise that AI isn’t a replacement for human creativity and judgment, but that it’s a tool, a powerful one at that, which, when guided by human empathy and art, will create beauty and heart.
The greatest irony of this AI age may be that humans are hired to clean up AI’s mess; the greatest tragedy, however, would be if we became so accustomed to that slop that we forgot what a clean, human-made world looks like. The cleanup crew is a temporary fix. The real work is in ensuring that our technological future is built not on a foundation of AI slop, but on a commitment to genuine human creativity and integrity.
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