Is AI creating jobs or just clean-up work? A Bath professor says fixing AI's "almost right" output risks becoming underpaid piecework

Akhil Bhardwaj, associate professor of strategy and organisation at the University of Bath, writes in The Conversation (republished by the Jamaica Gleaner) that evidence so far shows limited large-scale AI job losses, but a growing volume of "AI remediation" work: people hired to catch the errors, hallucinations and judgment gaps in output that AI agents produce. Some white-collar workers in finance, tech and retail say checking AI "workslop" adds to their workload. In translation, machine translation plus human "post-editing" is now the main workflow at many agencies, and research finds post-editing often pays less than translating while demanding similar or greater effort. Bhardwaj warns that routine checking of AI output could be shipped to offshore centres as "endless, underpaid digital piecework". The question for workers is not only whether AI takes a job, but whether the job it leaves behind is worse paid and more tedious than the one it replaced.