On one side is AI swallowing millions of jobs, and on the other is humans being hired to clean up the nonsense AI often generates, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi
This was early 2023, a few months after ChatGPT had just made the perfect superintelligence landing in our lives. A producer friend, who wanted a beat sheet of a series written into a synopsis, sent me a document he said he had gotten written.
A reading of its first paragraph was all it took to identify the writer: ChatGPT. The perfect robotic structure, excessive and often misplaced adverbs and adjectives, and the absence of indirect tense gave it away instantly. It was sloppy in its sterile perfection.
Yet, my friend asked me to take it as a base and improve it. Crunched for time, I did. I didn’t know then, but I had unwittingly participated in what would become one of the most in-demand gigs two years later: humans cleaning up AI slop.
Someone tried to generate a retro hip-hop album cover image with AI, but the text is all nonsense, and humans would have to be hired to clean that AI slop
This is the defining irony of the AI age. While AI is consuming millions of jobs, it is simultaneously creating a unique category of employment for hundreds of thousands of humans: cleaning up the mess AI makes. Designers, writers and digital artists are increasingly being hired not to create from scratch, but fix the mess AI invariably makes when tasked with complex work. What is doubly ironic is that these are often the same humans who would have been hired to create the original had AI not been brought to undercut them.
WHAT IS AI SLOP
Jack Izzo, in a Yahoo article, defines it better than any LLM can: “AI slop is the evolution of spam, in a way. Like spam, slop is low-quality content, but thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, it’s even easier to produce. Like spam, slop can grow like a weed if left unchecked, overwhelming social media feeds and leaving users unsure of what’s real and what’s not. Like spam, slop comes in many forms — posts on social media.. books on Amazon, music on Spotify, articles from less-than-reliable news outlets (and, unfortunately, some reliable outlets) and even occasionally in peer-reviewed scientific journals.”
It is the content equivalent of empty calories: visually or textually appealing, but devoid of substance, originality, or reliable meaning.
Never knew how much I needed to see bunnies jumping on a trampoline pic.twitter.com/1zn7uaPSHD — greg (@greg16676935420) July 28, 2025 A CCTV-style video of rabbits jumping on a backyard trampoline racked up over 200 million views on TikTok and X
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