Humans are being hired to make AI slop look less sloppy

The same technology that was supposed to put graphic designer Lisa Carstens out of business is now keeping her busier than ever

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 a good portion of her day working with startups and individual clients looking to fix their botched attempts at artificial intelligence-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 across the board: Anyone can now write blog posts, produce a graphic or code an app with a few text prompts, but AI-generated content rarely makes for a satisfactory final product on its own.