What do you do when your AI generated text or image comes out not quite right? A growing number of people are ​turning to writers and designers to fix that AI-generated slop​ and turn it into something useful. For several years, some people have predicted that the future of these sorts of creative tasks will involve some fusion of AI and talent. In The Future Normal, Henry and I wrote about the trend we called “Augmented Creativity” as a way of exploring this idea too.

This is a related, but perhaps slightly different idea. It’s not so much augmenting creativity or making things in partnership with AI. Instead, it’s more akin to a design version of emergency surgery or a visit to the ER … sometimes with a similar mix of desperation and panic baked into the requests themselves.

The end result is that in the short term this could offer a highly lucrative opportunity for designers and writers who can work under this sort of pressure, are willing to work off of AI-generated fails and have the emotional aptitude to handle these somewhat unreasonable and probably unrealistic sorts of timelines and expectations. If you’re one of those professionals, how do you feel about this? Would you take on work that was initially created unsuccessfully by AI or is that a red flag for you to steer clear?