Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.
So this little tidbit from the Guardian’s piece on the burgeoning “AI Slop Cleanup” gigs for freelancers is crazy, but also very much expected:
“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 the Guardian. 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.
Look, the title of today’s newsletter is hyperbolic, sure. In fact, you could also say it’s the absolute worst of times, because who really wants to clean up AI slop pixel by pixel? I agree that all of this does sound soulless, but boy, there’s never been a better time to profit off a bunch of dweebs who tried to prompt their way into a brand world.
Anywho, the real reason I’m bringing this up is that I would LOVE to hear from any freelancers who have taken on gigs cleaning up AI-generated work. Comment, because I would love to write about this.
I agree with everything that The New York Times’ Alissa Wilkinson says here about moviegoing audiences wanting something to feel connected to (in addition to great stories). But there’s also some Swiftian logic at play here, too. Audiences also want something they can obsess over and pore through, complete with Easter eggs and Qanon-level conspiracy theories. Backrooms, a world of infinite rooms and vast permutations, gives them exactly that, and the lore behind it hasn’t even been fully fleshed out. There’s an obvious branding lesson in here as well, but I’m trying not to make this gross, so I’ll leave you to connect the dots on whatever this has to do with 7UP.
Stoked as I am for the Alex Gibney doc on Musk, I genuinely don’t know if it will cause him to fall out of favor.
Roberta’s Pizza did not have to go this hard.
Maybe you neglected your Tamagotchi in 1998, but I’m a believer in second chances, so here’s a Tamagotchi ring.
Cold sheets are the best, but cold pillowcases? That said, this definitely didn’t come from Ben Cohen.
Patagonia has teamed up with native American and environmental activists to sue President Trump over Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument.
Toodles.
-Bill
Costco recently implemented a policy of no AI generated images of people on packaging sold in their warehouses. I have been designing for the Kirkland Signature brand as a freelancer as well as for vendors that sell to Costco. Last month I have had four projects from new clients come in, this month I’ve had six.
Not freelance, but salaried and facing the AI slop cleanup client-side. It’s grim out here. Now every new brief also comes with a “I asked Claude to help show you what it could look like” visualisation of the brief lol.