Freelance platforms are seeing a surge in demand for professionals to proofread AI-generated code, as well as AI-generated text, images, and videos. On Freelancer.com, the number of such vacancies has increased by 87%, and on Upwork, by 70% in a year.
Freelance platforms are seeing a surge in demand for professionals to proofread AI-generated code, as well as AI-generated text, images, and videos. On Freelancer.com, the number of such vacancies has increased by 87%, and on Upwork, by 70% in a year.
This is reported by The Guardian, citing data from major freelance platforms.
For example, on Freelancer.com, from August 2025 to June 2026, 10,760 ads appeared with queries like «fix AI,» «AI hallucination,» or «AI error.» People are most often sought after for graphics correction, followed by video editing, proofreading, and copywriting.
The most noticeable growth in AI cleaning is in development and design. Since 2023, the number of vacancies for fixing generated AI code and other work in Software & Web Development has increased 8.3 times, and the number of generated images, videos, and other creative content has increased 7.9 times.
This is likely because companies, especially smaller ones, use ChatGPT, Claude, and other tools to quickly get a first draft of work, but then encounter errors that they cannot fix themselves. Freelancer.com CEO Matt Barry argues that because of this, the savings in the first stage can easily disappear in the second, because bringing the AI draft to a state suitable for real use can be very long and expensive.
For example, illustrator Todd Van Linda told The Guardian that a client offered him about $500 to fix 13 to 15 AI-generated illustrations for a children’s book. The client expected each image to take about 15 minutes to complete. But Van Linda declined, saying his hourly rate was $65, and normal corrections of such images can take much longer.
Another freelancer, multimedia editor Nathan McConnell, received about 100 AI images for a tarot deck with typical AI errors — extra fingers and incorrectly drawn feet. It took him two to three hours to fix just one image in Photoshop. He refuses to take on some orders because sometimes the AI result cannot be «saved.»
For now, freelancers are unsure how long this kind of work will last. Some expect that models will gradually learn to produce better results. Others believe that even then, there will still be a need for people to check for errors and bring the work to a professional level.
Previously, dev.ua wrote that companies trying to save money through automation are hiring people to correct generated texts, images, and code.
