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Humans Are Being Hired to Make AI Slop Look Less Sloppy

1 week 3 days ago
Graphic designer Lisa Carstens "spends a good portion of her day working with startups and individual clients looking to fix their botched attempts at AI-generated logos," reports NBC News: 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... Fixing AI's mistakes is not their ideal line of work, many freelancers say, as it tends to pay less than traditional gigs in their area of expertise. But some say it's what helps pay the bills.... As companies struggle to figure out their approach to AI, recent data provided to NBC News from freelance job platforms Upwork, Freelancer and Fiverr also suggest that demand for various types of creative work surged this year, and that clients are increasingly looking for humans who can work alongside AI technologies without relying on or rejecting them entirely. Data from Upwork found that although AI is already automating lower-skilled and repetitive tasks, the platform is seeing growing demand for more complex work such as content strategy or creative art direction. And over the past six months, Fiverr said it has seen a 250% boost in demand for niche tasks across web design and book illustration, from "watercolor children story book illustration" to "Shopify website design." Similarly, Freelancer saw a surge in demand this year for humans in writing, branding, design and video production, including requests for emotionally engaging content like "heartfelt speeches...." The low pay from clients who have already cheaped out on AI tools has affected gig workers across industries, including more technical ones like coding. For India-based web and app developer Harsh Kumar, many of his clients say they had already invested much of their budget in "vibe coding" tools that couldn't deliver the results they wanted. But others, he said, are realizing that shelling out for a human developer is worth the headaches saved from trying to get an AI assistant to fix its own "crappy code." Kumar said his clients often bring him vibe-coded websites or apps that resulted in unstable or wholly unusable systems. "Even outside of any obvious mistakes made by AI tools, some artists say their clients simply want a human touch to distinguish themselves from the growing pool of AI-generated content online..."

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EditorDavid

Former US Government Site Climate.Gov Attempts Relaunch as Non-Profit

1 week 3 days ago
The U.S. government site climate.gov offered years' worth of climate-science information — until its production team was fired earlier this summer. The site "is technically still online, but has been intentionally buried by the team of political appointees who now run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration," reports the Guardian. But now "a team of climate communication experts — including many members of the former climate.gov team — is working to resurrect its content into a new organization with an expanded mission." Their effort's new website, climate.us, would not only offer public-facing interpretations of climate science, but could also begin to directly offer climate-related services, such as assisting local governments with mapping increased flooding risk due to climate change. The effort is being led by climate.gov's former managing editor, Rebecca Lindsey, who, although now unemployed, has recruited several of her former colleagues to volunteer their time in an attempt to build climate.us into a thriving non-profit organization... "None of us were ready to let go of climate.gov and the mission...." Lindsey's new team has received a steady flow of outside support, including legal support, and a short-term grant that has helped them develop a vision for what they'd like to do next... As multiyear veterans of the federal bureaucracy, at times they've been surprised by the possibilities that the new effort might offer. "We're allowed to use TikTok now," said Lindsey. "We're allowed to have a little bit of fun... The climate.us team is also in the process of soft-launching a crowdsourced fundraising drive that Lindsey hopes they can leverage into more permanent support from a major foundation.... "[W]e do not yet have the sort of large operational funding that we will need if we're going to actually transition climate.gov operations to the non-profit space." In the meantime, Lindsey and her team have found themselves spending the summer knee-deep in the logistics of building a major non-profit from scratch.

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EditorDavid