Jobs / Workforce

The Baltimore Sun fired 31-year staff cartoonist Kevin "KAL" Kallaugher in June 2025 with a phone call telling him Sunday would be his last day. By September 4, 2026, the paper was publishing AI-generated "cartoons" of generic Baltimoreans and a generic Mayor Brandon Scott standing in a generic Fells Point, captioned "Produced using Artificial Intelligence tools by the Baltimore Sun Editorial staff." Kallaugher, a two-time Pulitzer finalist and 2015 Herblock Prize winner whose work still runs in The Economist, called it "AI slop."

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists issued an open letter declaring that The Sun had "finally and completely surrendered any remaining claim it may have had to journalistic legitimacy." The Herb Block Foundation called the images "insipid" and "borderline immoral," adding that they "certainly do not qualify as satire or opinion journalism." Publisher Trif Alatzas did not respond to requests for comment. The Sun is owned by Sinclair Broadcasting chairman David D. Smith, who acquired the paper in January 2024.

A growing share of freelance creative work now consists of cleaning up AI-generated content: sharpening fuzzy AI images for print, hunting for extra fingers in tarot card illustrations, rewriting robotic blog posts, and removing shadows that fall the wrong direction in AI video. On Freelancer.com, job listings tagged with phrases like "correct AI," "AI hallucination," and "AI error" rose 87% to 10,760 globally between August 2025 and June 2026. Upwork saw AI remediation gigs jump 70% year over year; Fiverr saw keyword searches for "AI cleanup" grow more than 20 times between 2023 and 2026.

The catch is that clients routinely expect cleanup to be fast and cheap. One prospective client offered $500 to repair 13–15 AI-generated children's book illustrations, budgeting 15 minutes per image. Freelance illustrator Todd Van Linda, who charges $65 an hour, passed. Meanwhile, the original creative work that once sustained these careers is contracting: freelance image-creation gigs dropped 17% after AI image generators arrived, and those losses have continued. One freelance writer's monthly earnings from original content have fallen to roughly a third of what she made during the pandemic. Some clients now conceal their AI use entirely. "They say 'I don't use AI,' but there's a '[Google] Gemini logo on the bottom,'" said Lisa, a graphic designer in Spain.

One image in the official 208-page collector's artbook for Spider-Man: Brand New Day is drawing scrutiny after fans spotted warped taxis, distorted buildings, strange windows, and a damaged fire escape in a New York street scene titled "Big City, Little Spider." The image credits concept artist Scott McInnes. Marvel has not confirmed AI involvement.

The backlash spread across X, Reddit, and ResetEra after The Artbook Collector flagged the artwork on August 18, the same week the book shipped. The timing is uncomfortable for Marvel: the studio recently downsized its visual development team, and it already drew criticism in 2023 for using AI in Secret Invasion's opening title sequence. Fans are calling for transparency about AI use in credited creative work, particularly in premium, paid publications.

Stella Sacco, the former lead writer on Saber Interactive's upcoming Rideshare "Stimulator", says she was fired in December 2023 and replaced mid-development by ChatGPT. The game's trailer, released last month, appears to feature AI-written and AI-voiced dialogue. Saber's Steam listing carries no AI-content disclosure, which the platform requires.

CEO Matthew Karch initially denied replacing any writers with AI, then confirmed to The Verge that the game "incorporates AI," then issued a statement to This Week In Video Games in which he said he had to ask Claude who Sacco even was, called her replacement "someone more talented," and added that he would "frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI. At least we would be dealing with someone programmed to be honest." Sacco's response was measured: "This screed will be many people's first exposure to the Saber brand."

Futurism found that Sports Illustrated published articles under bylines belonging to people who do not exist. The fake authors came with AI-generated headshots and biographies. One "Sora Tanaka," product reviewer and lifelong fitness guru, was "thrilled to bring her fitness and nutritional expertise to the Product Reviews Team." A volleyball article credited to "Drew Ortiz" explained to readers that volleyball is fast-paced, has a high skill ceiling, and is generally exciting to both play and watch.

The Arena Group, which acquired SI in 2019, said the articles were commercial content supplied by the advertising firm AdVon Commerce, that AdVon had assured it everything was "written and edited by humans," and that it was in the midst of a review when the allegations surfaced. It then cut ties with AdVon and removed the content. The magazine laid off staff earlier in 2023, shortly after CEO and chairman Ross Levinsohn announced the company's incorporation of AI. In February he said that "while AI will never replace journalism, reporting, or crafting and editing a story, rapidly improving AI technologies can create enterprise value for our brands and partners."

The National Eating Disorders Association took down its chatbot Tessa after it handed a user "healthy eating tips" that included a daily calorie deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories plus weekly weighing and measuring. Activist Sharon Maxwell posted the exchange on Instagram: "If I had accessed this chatbot when I was in the throes of my eating disorder, I would NOT have gotten help for my ED. If I had not gotten help, I would not still be alive today." NEDA's own figures say moderate dieters are five times more likely to develop an eating disorder, and extreme restrictors 18 times more likely.

Tessa arrived two months after NEDA fired four helpline employees who had just won union certification. Their union, Helpline Associates United, has filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB. CEO Liz Thompson said the helpline closure was a business decision three years in the making, that the chatbot was a separate program, and that it is "not a highly functional AI system." About 2,500 people had used it. Tessa was built with chatbot maker Cass AI and psychology researchers, including Washington University's Ellen Fitzsimmons-Craft, who wrote that prevention programs requiring human time are "difficult to scale."

A week after the Guardian reported that Microsoft planned to fire the human editors who run MSN.com and replace them with AI, the software illustrated a story about Little Mix singer Jade Thirlwall's reflections on racism with a photo of her bandmate Leigh-Anne Pinnock. Both women are mixed race. Thirlwall, who had recently attended a Black Lives Matter protest in London, called it out on Instagram: "It offends me that you couldn't differentiate the two women of colour out of four members of a group … DO BETTER!" What she could not have known, according to sources at the company, is that the image had been selected by the AI.

Microsoft's fix was to replace the image. The follow-up problem was harder to solve: the robot editor kept selecting coverage of the incident from external news sites and publishing it to MSN.com. Remaining human staff were told to stay alert and delete the article if the system picked it up, and warned that even if they deleted it, the robot editor might overrule them and attempt to publish it again. Staff had already deleted coverage of the Little Mix error after the AI decided readers would be interested.

Amazon's Edinburgh engineering hub spent four years building a recruiting engine that scored job applicants from one to five stars, much as shoppers rate products. By 2015 the team had found the problem. The models were trained on ten years of résumés submitted to the company, most of them from men, and the system had taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized résumés containing the word "women's", as in "women's chess club captain", and downgraded graduates of two all-women's colleges. It also preferred verbs more common on male engineers' résumés, such as "executed" and "captured".

The group built 500 models for specific job functions and locations, each taught roughly 50,000 terms found on past applicants' résumés. Editing out the offending words was no guarantee the machines wouldn't devise other discriminatory ways of sorting candidates, and bad training data meant unqualified people were recommended for all manner of jobs, with results returning "almost at random". Amazon disbanded the team by the start of 2017. It kept a "much watered-down version" of the engine to cull duplicate candidate profiles from databases, and has since formed a new Edinburgh team to try automated employment screening again, this time with a focus on diversity.

On a Friday, Facebook laid off up to 26 contractors who wrote and edited the descriptions attached to Trending Topics, handing the job to an algorithm in a bid to reduce bias. On Sunday, a story headlined "Breaking: Fox News Exposes Traitor Megyn Kelly, Kicks Her Out for Backing Hillary" appeared in the trending list. It was not true.

Facebook says humans are still involved, to "confirm that a topic is tied to a current news event in the real world." Its hoax detection runs on user-submitted reports that a link is fishy, so a fabricated story stays up for as long as readers keep falling for it. The same month, false reports of gunmen triggered mass panic at JFK on 14 August and LAX on 28 August, and Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to let users trigger Safety Check themselves during emergencies. "Machines think in black and white," said Mandy Jenkins, head of news at Storyful. "I don't think verification can be automated yet." Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.