Designer now charging as much to fix AI designs as designing something from scratch

Ontario graphic designer Nathan Mercer has said he now charges the same fee to fix AI-generated marketing assets as he would have to design them from scratch, especially as this Canadian creative realised fixing AI-slop requires no apologising when it’s not his work that needs the fix.

The decision follows a noticeable shift in client enquiries, with brochures, social media graphics, banners and event posters increasingly arriving alongside the words, "AI got me about 90% of the way there."

“Truth be told it never has," Mercer clarified. “Maybe 40% of the way there at best, then I spend the remaining 60% explaining why their logo being stretched, non-existent margins, and a handful of gibberish text throughout is probably a bad thing.”

Mercer says clients often suffer from what he calls "AI attachment syndrome", where the satisfaction of making something themselves clouds their judgement of whether it's actually any good. "It's a bit like that Canadian politician who accidentally read the AI prompt aloud," he said. "Everyone else spotted the problem immediately. The person closest to the work was the last to notice."

The trend is reportedly extending beyond design studios, with print shops across the world seeing a growing number of AI-generated files that arrive each day that might look acceptable but collapse under even the gentlest scrutiny required for commercial printing.

Among the most common issues are low-resolution graphics, no bleed, RGB artwork, and PDFs that somehow manage to contain both none and all of the required print specifications simultaneously.

One commercial printer we found said their business now had to introduce an "AI Recovery Service", with customers regularly paying an additional 50 to 100 per cent of the print cost simply to make artwork printable for small print runs in particular.

The irony, Mercer says, “Is that many businesses are slowly discovering the opportunity cost they were trying to avoid”.

As more businesses begin comparing the cost of fixing AI designs with the cost of simply hiring a designer in the first place, industry analysts believe a new appreciation is on the horizon if not already emerging for creative expertise.

Or, as Mercer put it, “What a shocker when it turns out doing it twice isn't actually cheaper than doing it once, eh?”

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