Hi First name / there!
If you missed my last newsletter, I talked about the AI tools I’m using and my mixed feelings about AI. This month, I want to talk about how I’m seeing my clients use it.
What I’m experiencing is that for the most part, they’re using it to brainstorm or as a starting point for what they want me to edit. A few clients have copied and pasted HTML straight into an email and sent it to me with no other context. I found it confusing at first, and I’d put the code in a code block on their website and show them, “See, this is not going to work. This is not responsive.” (That’s me being passive aggressive 🫢). Their answers were usually, “I knew it wasn’t going to be copy and paste. It’s just what it gave me, and I didn’t know what it meant, so I thought I’d send it to you.” Or, “I thought I was making things easier, but I think I’m making it more difficult.”
What I realized is that they aren’t asking me to do exactly what the AI said. They’re trusting me to implement it in Squarespace in a friendly, editable, accessible way. But not going to lie, it did first feel like they didn’t trust me and it made me feel so uneasy, but having a conversation on why they used AI and their expectations helped me understand.
I’m not necessarily against clients giving me AI content for their website content or using it to brainstorm, because I personally think it’s their website and they can put whatever they want on there. But when it comes to my part, the work I do, I do have boundaries. One client asked me to create their case study content with AI, using a past case study. I told them I wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t part of my scope, and I had no context to feed the AI, so the output would have been terrible. They understood, and they’re writing it themselves (or maybe using AI… but it’s content they’ll give me, and what goes on their website is their choice imo).
My current takeaway is to have the conversation, especially if something makes you uncomfortable. And come up with your own boundaries and put them in your contract. I’m updating mine soon, and I’ll likely include no AI-generated feedback or revision requests. I haven’t run into that yet, but AI doesn’t know the project or what we’ve talked about, so that feedback needs their own critical thinking. For me right now, it’s less about saying no to AI and more about getting curious about why clients brought it in, and being clear on what I will and won’t do.
