Companies hire – and rehire – humans to fix AI-generated content flooding the internet

A new irony has emerged in the AI age: while artificial intelligence eliminates millions of jobs, it simultaneously creates hundreds of thousands of new roles for humans whose sole purpose is cleaning up the low-quality content AI generates. This “AI slop”—ranging from glitchy videos to factually incorrect articles—is flooding the internet, forcing companies to hire human specialists to fix what AI creates poorly, often employing the same people who would have originally created the content before AI undercut their roles.

What you should know: AI slop represents the industrialized production of low-quality, AI-generated content that mimics legitimate material but lacks substance and accuracy.

• Jack Izzo, a Yahoo tech journalist, defines AI slop as “the evolution of spam” that’s easier to produce thanks to tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, appearing across social media, Amazon books, Spotify music, and even scientific journals.
• Viral examples include a hyper-realistic seagull video with 140 million views and CCTV-style rabbit videos with over 200 million views on TikTok and X, many containing tell-tale glitches like two-headed animals or disappearing subjects.
• The phenomenon extends beyond entertainment, with AI-generated adult content, product reviews, and news articles flooding platforms at unprecedented scale.

The cleanup economy: A new category of workers has emerged specifically to fix AI-generated content across multiple industries.

• AI content rewriters are hired to improve AI-generated articles, blogs, and marketing content that lack nuance, emotional resonance, and factual accuracy.
• Art fixers redraw or retouch AI-generated logos and illustrations that often feature wrapped text, unrealistic symmetry, and pixelation issues.
• AI code debuggers patch buggy code from GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT, testing and optimizing what AI generates, while AI video polishers enhance glitchy AI-generated videos that get physics wrong and generate random objects within frames.

Why this matters: This trend reveals fundamental inefficiencies in how businesses are implementing AI technology.

• The promised cost savings from AI are undermined by the “hidden overhead of human quality control,” creating a bizarre cycle where machines create problems at scale and humans fix them at premium rates.
• Freelance platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer show surging demand for human-led creativity, especially in writing, image creation, and design.
• People who might have become artists are now relegated to “digital janitorial duties,” leading to frustration and burnout while contributing to environmental damage through excessive water and electricity consumption.

The bigger picture: AI slop represents the “enshittification of culture itself” as low-quality content overwhelms platforms and buries genuine information.

• The internet’s existing misinformation problem is being industrialized, with AI generating thousands of plausible-sounding but false articles in the time it takes humans to write one.
• Music playlists overflow with AI-generated tracks, Amazon fills with AI-written books, and social media platforms gradually populate with synthetic videos.
• This creates a parallel economy where AI replaces humans in certain jobs while simultaneously creating menial cleanup roles for them.

What experts think: The solution lies not in abandoning AI but in fundamentally changing how humans interact with it.

• “The problem here, as often isn’t artificial intelligence, but natural human stupidity,” writes Satyen K. Bordoloi, emphasizing that AI slop results from “a gold rush mentality that prioritises speed, volume and cost-cutting over quality, authenticity, and truth.”
• Bordoloi argues humans should “always be in the loop, not brought in at the end to clean up,” positioning AI as a tool guided by human empathy and creativity rather than a replacement for human judgment.
• “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.”