Demand for AI cleanup work is growing. On Freelancer.com, a contract work platform with more than 88 million users, job listings tagged with phrases such as “correct AI”, “AI hallucination” and “AI error” rose 87% to 10,760 globally between August 2025 and June 2026, according to internal data shared with theGuardian.
The jobs were concentrated in graphic design, followed by video editing, proofreading and content writing. Upwork saw AI remediation gigs jump 70% year over year, and Fiverr saw keyword searches for “AI cleanup” services grow more than 20 times between 2023 and 2026, according to data shared with the Guardian.
The specter of AI could spell trouble for the creative freelance labor market. Listings for freelance jobs exposed to automation fell 21% in the eight months after ChatGPT launched and image-creation gigs dropped 17% after AI image generators arrived, according to a 2025 study published in the academic journal Management Science. And those losses have continued, according to a 2026 study.
Meanwhile, more workers are turning to freelance work as companies cut staff and hire less, intensifying competition. The average project on Freelancer.com drew 54 bids in 2025, up 8% from the year before, according to the site’s annual report.
But as companies cut costs, they’re changing the nature of freelance assignments, from requests for creative work to sprucing up AI output. Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com, said the cleanup work is often commissioned by small companies and entrepreneurs using AI to produce a first pass, only to run into problems they don’t have the expertise to solve.
“[AI output] needs a human to turn it into something polished that can actually be used,” he said. The time and money saved on the first draft can be eaten up by the “incredibly time-consuming” work of preparing it for commercial use.
