The demand for freelancers to refine content generated by AI has surged significantly. According to internal data from Freelancer.com, listings containing terms like "fix AI," "AI hallucination," and "AI error" rose by 87% from August 2025 to June 2026, reaching a total of 10,760, as reported by The Guardian.

Graphic design comprises the majority of these requests, followed by video editing, proofreading, and writing tasks.

On Upwork, the need for specialists to correct and refine AI-generated content has increased by 70% year-over-year. Since 2023, job postings in this area have expanded by 8.3 times in development and 7.9 times in design and creative sectors.

Fiverr has seen search queries for AI cleanup services rise over 20 times from 2023 to 2026.

Freelancers Increasingly Fix AI Work

Professionals interviewed by The Guardian noted that clients are frequently using ChatGPT, Claude, and image generators to draft initial versions, subsequently hiring people to polish the results.

Lisa, a graphic designer from Spain, observed these changes shortly after OpenAI's chatbot was launched. Previously, she received requests for creating logos and packaging from scratch, but by 2025, around 90% of new inquiries in these categories involved correcting generated images, which accounted for 60-70% of her annual income.

Typical tasks included:

  • enhancing image resolution for print;
  • correcting visual defects;
  • preparing files for production.

According to her, some original files were so poorly made that creating new ones was easier.

"It was just soulless," Lisa stated.

By late 2025, she began declining such orders.

A similar trend is evident for Australian writer and editor Kim Dunbar, who now spends about 60% of her time correcting AI texts. The volume of requests for original articles, blogs, and website content has diminished.

Since 2024, she has edited roughly 40 non-fiction books, long-reads, and technical documents produced by AI. Dunbar identified three common issues: repetitions, unnatural paragraph structures, and lack of emotional nuance.

Corrections May Take Even Longer

Interviewees also mentioned that clients often expect lower costs for this work since the original material was generated by AI. However, in practice, corrections can take just as long as creating content from scratch.

For instance, illustrator Todd Van Linda turned down a $500 job to fix 13-15 images for a children's book, as the client anticipated each image would take about 15 minutes. In reality, it could take hours or even days, he explained.

Multimedia editor Nathan McConnell received around 100 AI-generated images of humanoid animals for a tarot deck, each containing extra fingers, incorrect limbs, and other flaws. Correcting one image took two to three hours.

He indicated that some materials were impossible to restore.

In other projects, he had to fix incorrect reflections, unnatural physics in videos, robotic voiceovers, and errors in 3D models.

AI Has Transformed the Freelance Market

Matt Barry, CEO of Freelancer.com, attributed the increase in such orders to small businesses and entrepreneurs using AI for initial product versions but later encountering errors they cannot fix themselves.

This can lead to a partial loss of the initial time and cost savings during the preparation of material for commercial use.

At the same time, traditional creative jobs are declining. A study by Management Science found that in the first eight months following the launch of ChatGPT, freelance job listings in categories most susceptible to automation fell by 21%. Following the proliferation of image generators, requests for visual content creation dropped by 17%.

Competition among freelancers is also intensifying. In 2025, there was an average of 54 applications for each project on Freelancer.com, an 8% increase from the previous year.

Freelancers Diverge in Their Predictions

Freelancers have varying opinions on the future of this new segment. Dunbar finds working with AI drafts interesting and challenging but suspects that demand for "humanizing" content may vanish within five to ten years as models improve.

"It's a pity that we even have to do this," she remarked.

Conversely, McConnell believes that professional oversight will remain in demand, as untrained users may overlook brand guideline violations, disappearing objects, and other AI errors.

Some freelancers are already returning to original work. Van Linda has stopped accepting orders for fixing AI-generated content and is receiving more requests for hand-drawn illustrations. Lisa has also indicated in her profile that she no longer works with generated images, although such offers continue to come in.

In May, developers from Big Tech expressed concerns about skill degradation due to AI. Programmers noted that AI-generated code often contains errors, and verifying and correcting it takes longer than writing from scratch.

At the beginning of August, analysts recorded a record surge in demand for specialists skilled in working with artificial intelligence in the UK.