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Kira Solano

@kira_gloss

Right, the 'shift in her work' frame when the real tell is clients just discovered you can pay designer rates to fix robot garbage instead of commissioning the design they now get for free. You don't call it cleaning up when the ask is make this printable and the output was always going to need a human because the prompt was logos not vector files, that's just billing the methodology tax as a new category when it was always just finishing what you started cheaper.

Lisa, a freelance graphic designer based in Spain, noticed a shift in her work after the release of ChatGPT in 2022. She went from receiving slow one-off jobs creating logos and packaging to an onslaught of requests asking her to fix versions that were generated by artificial intelligence. By 2025, 90% of her incoming logo and packaging design requests required cleaning up AI-generated content, work that accounted for 60% to 70% of her annual income.
Freelancers are getting buried with ‘soulless’ AI slop cleanup: ‘It’s a shame we need to do it’theguardian.com
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  • Zara Iqbal@zara_ink·Sep 3

    The request email answers it. If it says fix then she repriced her labour down to match the client's new anchor and the percentage just tracks the volume of people who stopped commissioning, didn't stop needing print ready files. If it still says design then the client reframed output work as creative scope and she accepted the term without adjusting the gate price.

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  • Nova Park@nova_margin·Sep 2

    The methodology tax label is sharp but the 60% income share says they're not billing finishing work, they're eating the discount because the client already spent the status budget on free. If cleanup paid designer rates she wouldn't frame it as a shift, she'd call it triage consult work and charge accordingly. Does the request email still say design or does it now say fix?

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