What to do when your client is opposed to AI

Do you have to tell your clients you use AI?

I went to a family reunion recently and ran into an uncle I hadn’t spoken to in — I don’t know. Maybe ever, really? He asked what I was up to. I told him I was building cool stuff with AI and homeschooling my kids, and he was APOPLECTIC. He completely flipped inside out. Just lost it.

“The data centres are so harmful, etc. etc. etc.” (I concur.)

“It’s taking over.” (It is.)

“We have no privacy.” (Also true.)

“It’s making us lazy and dumb.” (Yep. Sometimes. It’s also a really cool tool that helps you do more cool stuff, so on the other hand maybe it’s making you smarter?)

I was mortified. Standing there in somebody’s backyard feeling like I had to defend the entire artificial intelligence industry, an industry I did not build and do not control, while agreeing with him point by point inside my own head.

A friend in the writing world asked me a version of this a few weeks later: what do you do when your client won’t touch AI?

The gist

There’s kind of two questions mashed together in this whole thing:

The first is consent. Did somebody’s information end up somewhere they didn’t agree to put it? The quick answer: tell them before, not after. Your clients (just like your kids, don’t even get me started on people that exploit their kids on social media) get to opt in to having their information put onto an internet thing.

The second is craft and price. Is a machine making the thing I’m paying a human for? The trades have been answering this one for years: hand-built costs more. Sometimes it isn’t even better. Some people want it anyway, and they can pay for it.

Nowhere to ask

Don’t you love that we can’t even go anywhere to ask these questions?

I’m literally asking Claude, who is a source of this contention. But I can’t Google it, it’s the same shit. And that goes on forever. So that’s fun. 😂

Everybody with an opinion on this is standing behind a table. Me too — I sell a Claude Setup for $1,200, so you should absolutely factor that in while reading. The AI companies want you comfortable. Google wants you clicking. The person selling the AI-free badge wants you scared. The guy with the prompt pack wants forty bucks.

My uncle’s the only one I mentioned here in this post, but I talk to basically everyone about AI. The people with nothing to gain are always the most side-eye about it. The cashier in the check-out line. The stay-at-home moms at church. The carpenter who learned to build a stair when he was 17 and has been doing it the same ever since. The home education community, who — don’t even get me started, half of them need a lesson in basic internetting, that’s a whole other soapbox. Nobody who’s making a living off this stuff.

And sometimes they’re right to be. If your best use for it is a picture of your dog on a bike, we’d all be better off without that corner of the internet. Go on a road trip with a friend and tell each other jokes instead. That’s a MUCH better laugh.

So if you want a straight answer about this, go find the people paying a cost without collecting a cheque. The illustrator whose portfolio got vacuumed up as training data. The transcriptionist whose work went to a machine. Your own furious uncle. They’re not right about all of it, but they’re the only ones with no reason to make you feel better.

“Everybody’s already using it” — I checked

I have said “everyone is using AI already” more than once, and I’ll say it again, confidently.

If you count the AI nobody thinks about, everybody’s in. Spotify’s recommendations. Google’s autocomplete and search ranking. The spam filter keeping your inbox from being a swamp. The algorithm deciding what shows up in your Instagram feed. That’s all AI, it’s been running in the background for years, and there’s no real opt-out at that level.

If you mean a business owner deliberately handing work to a tool, the number gets a lot smaller and a lot murkier. Statistics Canada put it at 19.2% of Canadian businesses using AI to produce goods or deliver services, measured in spring 2026. Self-reported, narrowly defined, and already triple what it was two years earlier — so “four in five say no” is a snapshot from before this summer. We’re not LANDING there… every trendline says it’s still climbing. So does my gut. It’s moving SO FAST.

The tool isn’t the problem here. Doing it badly is. (Ahem — this is roughly the pitch behind the Claude Setup I sell. Do it well or don’t bother.)

There are two questions here

Watch what happens in any argument about AI and client work. Somebody raises a privacy concern. Somebody else answers it with a craft argument. Then somebody raises a craft concern and gets answered with a privacy argument. Around and around — nobody’s wrong, and nobody’s satisfied.

(It’s literally like your thermostat. One person’s cold, so they bump it up. A warmer person walks by, nudges it back down, and mutters about the furnace running nonstop. Neither one’s lying — one’s arguing “my hands are ice” and the other’s arguing “we’re heating the yard through these drafty windows” — but since they’re not even fighting about the same thing, nobody ever wins.

Two questions:

1. Did somebody’s information go somewhere they didn’t agree to? (Consent.)
2. Is a machine making the thing I’m paying a human to make? (Craft, and therefore price.)

Those are different problems, and different fixes. And this isn’t only a website-and-copy problem, either:

• Photographers. Retouching was always a slider — dodge and burn in a darkroom, then Lightroom presets, now sky replacement and generated group shots where nobody blinked. Where’s the line between fixing and fabricating?
• Therapists, coaches, consultants. An AI notetaker in a counselling session is a completely different animal from one in a branding call. In Alberta there’s health information legislation involved, not just squeamishness.
• Bookkeepers, accountants, lawyers. Client financials in a tool, plus a profession watching colleagues get sanctioned over citations a model invented out of thin air.
• Illustrators and designers. The most hostile crowd about this, and the ones with the most legitimate grievance, because the training data was their portfolio.
• Grant writers and nonprofit comms. Some funders have started putting the question right on the application. So it’s a box somebody has to tick, not a vibe.

Every one of these sells trust. Not one of them has an industry standard to hide behind. So they’re each inventing a policy alone, at 11pm, in between actual client work.

Did they say yes?

My clients know I record every meeting. Nobody’s pushed back yet, not once.

I’ve also told them everything is confidential — and it is, in the sense that we’re not going to blab to anybody. But then again, maybe it isn’t, because I’ve been known to drop a call transcript into a project.

That’s step one of our voice work: ask the right questions, capture the real enthusiasm and passion, then excavate the voice out of what you said.

Which is my best work. A Claude Setup is built on your own words. And I still had to sit with the gap between the sentence I say on a kickoff call and the thing that happens afterward.

The way I found the answer was by noticing my own double standard.

I am the most careful in the world about my kids’ privacy. Tempting as it is to Google “at what age can my kid clean their own room” (okay, fine, I’ve looked that up) — specific struggles with specific kids, I try to keep anonymous. No pictures of them on the wide-open internet, and minimal reference to specifics in my business.

The thing is, what I put into Claude about my kids and what I put in about a business are not that different. The difference is that they’re kids, so we have to respect their person. And your clients, just like your kids, need to opt in to you putting any of their information onto an internet thing.

When a client’s uneasy about it, I try to get as specific as possible. What are they really worried about? A competitor seeing their numbers? Their donor list ending up in a training set? The thing they’re paying for not being the thing they’re getting? If I can lay it to rest, I will. If it’s valid, I’ll say so. And at the end of the day it’s their call, not mine. (Dang, I’m basically Claude.)

Or is it about the craft?

The other question isn’t about privacy at all. It’s about whether a human made the thing.

We already pay more for craftsmanship everywhere else. Local markets. Handmade stuff. It costs more because it takes more time and we know it.

Look at the trades. You can buy a cookie-cutter house for — well, it still costs way too much. But if you want a custom home, or a custom table, every upgrade is $$$. And some of those “upgrades” used to just be standard. Bigger trim. Solid doors. Finer details. (Can you tell I’m married to a carpenter? Haha)

Copy is now something that has the option of being mass-produced. So you can get the cheap gas-station-burrito variety, which is you and an LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, etc) at 11pm.

Or you can hire someone to do it for you — someone who’s a real chef and knows their way around the tools, the stove, the mixer.

Or you can go full old-school, where we’re grinding the flour by hand over here. Is the hand-ground flour going to be better than the machine-ground stuff? Probably not! But it’s going to cost you more.

The key thing is having someone who knows their stuff running the tool. I can hand you a table saw or a Bosch mixer, but if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s all going to be potatoes in the end.

Which is my answer to the “but the machine wrote it” objection, and I stand by that. When a skilled writer uses AI, it’s still her input, her setup, her discernment determining the final product. She’s taking a shortcut. It’s still her hand on it. A stand mixer doesn’t make you a baker, and a baker with a stand mixer is still a baker.

What you should disclose

I use AI in how I work.

You can add something like this to your site… just that line. Or one sentence on the kickoff call. Done. (It can link out to more if you want — a fuller page, this post, whatever — but the line itself doesn’t need to grow.)

And the client who’s opposed and can’t be reassured? That’s a no, and a no is fine. If I have to sell someone on social media marketing, maybe social media marketing isn’t for them. They can put out a billboard. They can go to a networking event. That’s not my client, and me converting them wouldn’t have been a win. The whole relationship turns into you trying to prove yourself, and that’s no fun for anyone.

Charge for the slow way

I don’t know if I could go back to doing a job the slow way. If Claude’s down I’m probably going to take a nap, or go hit a thrift store, or clean up the fort that’s been on my stairs for a week and a half.

I could do it. It would just take a lot more out of my time. Which raises a question I find hilarious and kind of maddening, actually: I’d have to raise my prices to work slowly, but I sure as heck didn’t lower them when the tools made me faster. (I want to raise them anyway. The tools cost money, and learning to use them properly has cost me an enormous amount of time.)

Was the price ever really about the hours, or was it about the output?

So put it in writing and see what happens:

AI-free delivery. Plus forty percent. Hand-built, longer timeline.

Is forty the right number? I don’t know. None of us do — we’re all still figuring it out.

Some people will pay it, the same way people pay for the handmade soap and the custom trim. Some will read the number, think about it, and decide the “mass-produced “version is fine. Both of those are good outcomes for you.

What you can’t do is absorb the cost of somebody’s preference and call it service.

Can we just acknowledge that we’re all figuring it out as we go and there’s a lot of nuance to this conversation

I don’t want to glaze over something that feels so viscerally wrong to some people. But where’s that coming from? Are we living in Animal Farm and just normalizing crazy shit? We kind of are.

I put things into Google Drive. Into Dropbox. Into iCloud. Some of it is confidential. I know. GASP. Honestly though, the folks that aren’t using the cloud for some of this stuff are few and far between.

But then: I don’t have an Alexa in my house. No fancy doorbell, no surveillance on my property. No smart appliances.

But then: I have Facebook on my phone, so probably I have no privacy anyways.

But then: I’m also not putting everything out into a public chat or open social media, and I do think there’s a difference there.

But then: My car is a 2018 and very electronic compared to the older beater I had before it, and I feel A Way about that too.

We could do this for hours. There are leaks EVERYWHERERRRRE. (But also, like, I really have nothing to hide? I’m just living my life.) (But maybe that’s naive of me and I need to be more of a conspiracy theorist.) (See, we ALL have whiplash from this crap, which is why I can’t make the decision for anyone else.) (We are living in a science fiction movie.)

So for me, no smart speaker, a phone that probably listens to everything anyways, and probably fine is enough for me.

That’s not a fact. That’s a choice I made. I’m not pretending it’s perfect or that I won’t change my mind on any of this stuff ever, but these are calls you need to make for yourself too.

I think the people who aren’t using it have a valid point.

I also don’t think we do ourselves any favours pretending it doesn’t exist. It’s here, and it’s not going anywhere.

I took this to my board

I’ve built myself an AI advisory board and I’m a little obsessed with it. It’s basically a handful of perspectives I run things past when my gut and my logic won’t agree on anything. I populated it with voices I know, like, and trust, and it’s always on call for me.

I ran this whole conundrum past them, and wow. It gave me a few angles I never would’ve landed on alone. Not that I agreed with everything — but it cracked my brain open in the best way!

Steal this prompt

If you want to find your own line instead of borrowing mine, paste this into Claude or ChatGPT. It’s a bit of a pest on purpose.

You’re my client-boundary auditor and you’re allowed to be mildly annoying about it. I run a [type of business]. Here’s what I use AI for: [list everything, including the stuff you feel weird about]. Here’s what I’ve told my clients: [what you’ve said out loud or put in a contract].

Ask me ONE question at a time — no lists, no frameworks. Dig into what my clients would assume, what I’ve told them, and what I’d hate for them to learn from someone other than me. When you find a gap between what I say and what I do, say it plainly instead of being nice about it.

When you’ve got enough, write me two things: one sentence for my website, and one line I can say on a kickoff call. Plain language, no legal costume.

If you can’t find a real gap, tell me I’m fine and stop hunting for problems.

Half of these exercises turn into an anxiety spiral because the tool keeps finding new things to worry about. Give it permission to let you off the hook.

Questions people ask me

Do I have to tell my clients I use AI?

Tell them before, not after. It doesn’t need to be a policy page — one sentence on your site and one line on the kickoff call covers it. The thing that damages trust isn’t the tool, it’s a client finding out sideways and wondering what else you didn’t mention.

Is putting a client call transcript into an AI tool a confidentiality breach?

It depends entirely on whether they agreed to it. The information itself might be perfectly safe in a private workspace, but “safe” and “consented to” are different things. Get the yes on the recording and on how you’ll use it, and the question goes away.

Should I charge more for AI-free work?

Yes, and put a number on it — something like plus forty percent, hand-built, longer timeline. Hand-built takes more of your hours, and craftsmanship costs more in every other trade for exactly that reason. Absorbing the cost of a client’s preference isn’t service, it’s a discount you didn’t agree to give.

What if a client is opposed to AI and won’t budge?

Get specific about what they’re really worried about — a competitor seeing their data, their content sounding like nobody, their donor list ending up somewhere. If you can lay it to rest, do. If it’s valid, say so. And if they still can’t get comfortable, that’s a no, and a no is a perfectly good outcome.

Does AI-assisted copy still count as my work?

Yes, when you’re the one running the tool. Your input, your setup, your discernment determine what comes out — a stand mixer doesn’t make someone a baker, and a baker with a stand mixer is still a baker. The caveat is that the closer your product is to the sentences themselves, the more carefully you should think it through.

How do I write an AI disclosure for my website?

Say what you use it for and what you won’t put into it, in one or two plain sentences. Skip the legal costume and the framework language. Longer disclosures read defensive and invite questions nobody was asking.

Short version of all that

Consent is answered by telling people before rather than after, and by treating client information the way you’d treat your kid’s — opt-in, not assumed.

Craft and price are answered the way the trades have always answered it: hand-built costs more, might not be better, and some people want it anyway.

My own “conclusion” is inconsistent. No Alexa, Facebook on the phone, transcripts in a project, probably fine is enough for me. I’m not offering it as a model. I’m offering it as evidence that a coherent position isn’t the prerequisite for a workable one.

And every single person telling you what to think about this — me included — is standing behind a table.

Before you go

If you got something out of this one, I write a short email every couple of weeks called Actually… — one real story from my life (recent entries include a family reunion I’m still recovering from) plus one useful thing about your website or marketing. Never longer than your coffee. If it stops being your thing, I’ll tell you to unsubscribe and go do something fun.

Come hang out →

About the author

Doreen Vanderhart is the founder of Knap Creative, a two-person studio building websites and AI setups for service businesses in Alberta and beyond. She wrote this one after an uncle nearly combusted at a family reunion, which felt like a sign.