Good AI work is human-sourced

? The path to competent AI output is paved with human grunt work. According to NBC News, humans are being hired to pick up after AI, tasked with fixing sloppy work generated by still-faulty bots as customer dissatisfaction with the technology’s performance grows. This could spell good news for creatives whose jobs were seemingly threatened by genAI.

A few text prompts and a human can get the job done. After an overreliance on its platforms, workers are now being hired to scrub AI influence from projects, going in manually to rectify any inaccuracies or to rid it of identifiable and generic AI markers. Recent data reported by NBC reveals that clients are increasingly looking for humans to supplement work generated by AI.

The A in AI doesn’t stand for artiste. AI illustrations are easy to spot thanks to obvious anatomical goofs, “plasticine effect,” and unintelligible text. Graphic designers — whose careers were the first to be written off by AI proponents — are now being sought out to revise AI-generated work, sometimes having to completely redraw illustrations, or simply polishing up images to make them less observably automated.

Copywriters — another endangered profession — are being hired to rewrite AI-generated articles, editing out redundancies like the hallmark AI em-dash (though we at EnterpriseAM are still fighting for humans’ claim to the punctuation mark), and buzzwords that serve as AI dogwhistles. Other times, they’re forced to do extensive research that the AI failed to provide, or completely hallucinated. AI-assisted coding also doesn’t seem to be cutting it, with developers being commissioned to fix ineffective vibe-coded websites and apps, like Microsoft’s August update to Windows that has been reportedly breaking SSDs just months after CEO Satya Nadella boasted about AI’s 30% contribution to software code.

These gigs are not exactly a freelancer’s dream — given that they’re often underpaid — with clients underestimating the hard work they put into fixing AI’s sloppy mistakes. Mending a draft to produce infallible work demands the same, if not more, effort than starting from scratch, according to freelancers who take on these jobs out of financial necessity. While clients and employers resort to AI tools for cost-cutting purposes, they now have to turn to freelancers to add a corrective human touch at an added price.

AI isn’t on track to replace humans anytime soon. People remain an indispensable part of guaranteeing the creation of quality work. While AI still occupies automated, “unskilled” tasks, complex and creative work is witnessing growing job demand — freelance job platform Fiverr has reported a 250% hike in demand for niche work in areas like web design and book illustration. Just last year, Amazon’s allegedly AI-powered grocery store in the UK — which promised a “just walk out” experience for customers, letting them grab whatever they wanted with the total automatically deducted from their linked credit card — was found to have been employing around 1k remote workers to watch customers through CCTV and keep track of the items they checked out.