Three questions, arriving together
Clients now ask some version of all three: did you use AI, do we have to tell anyone, and can we own the result. Deciding your position in the middle of a call is how people end up saying something they cannot stand behind.
Disclose, and do it for self-interested reasons
The argument is not moral. It is that discovery is worse than disclosure. A client who finds out later has a reason to cancel, to renegotiate, and to tell other people. A client who was told at the brief stage has agreed to it.
Put a line in the agreement rather than in conversation:
*"AI tools may be used for [background removal / upscaling / rough drafting / rotoscoping]. Final delivered assets are [describe what they are]. No generated likeness or voice of a real person will be used without written consent."*
Ask at the brief stage which way this client leans, because both extremes exist. Some clients want AI used and are paying for speed. Others forbid it outright for brand-policy, sector-regulation or agreement reasons. Finding out at delivery is the expensive version of finding out.
What you can honestly promise about ownership
Be careful here, because it is easy to promise something that is not yours to give.
In the United States, the Copyright Office has held that purely generated images do not attract copyright, because there is no human author — prompting, however elaborate, is not authorship. So you cannot promise a client exclusivity over an element you only prompted. Other countries have reached different conclusions: a Beijing court found an AI image protectable on the basis of the user's choices and refinement, and the UK has a decades-old provision deeming an author for computer-generated works. Making things with AI covers the disagreement in detail.
Practically:
- For anything that must be exclusive — a logo, a wordmark, a recurring character — do not deliver a pure generation. Layer human authorship you can point to: your drawing underneath, your redraw, your compositing, your typography, your arrangement. Keep the working files, because they are the evidence.
- Route around the problem where you can. A trademark protects a mark through use and registration regardless of how it was drawn.
- The bigger commercial risk is usually not "do we own this" but "does this infringe something": a trademarked character, a recognisable person, a style so specific it names a living artist. That risk sits in the client's published campaign, not in your file, which is exactly why they will look for someone to indemnify. Do not indemnify beyond your own work.
Labelling is becoming law, not etiquette
Several countries now require synthetic media to be labelled where a viewer could take it for a record of something real. India's IT Rules amendments prescribe *visibility* — a label occupying a defined portion of the frame and the opening portion of audio, with a duty on platforms to verify declarations. China requires both a visible label and one in the file metadata. The EU AI Act carries transparency duties for generated content and deepfakes.
If your client publishes into one of those markets, delivering an unlabelled synthetic asset hands them a duty they may not know they have. Tell them, in one sentence, and deliver a labelled version alongside. It takes a minute and it is the difference between being the supplier who caused a problem and the one who prevented it. AI images goes deeper on how the labelling actually attaches to a file and why it falls off.
Consent is not a style question
Likeness and voice require written consent from the person, every time. A client saying "she is fine with it" is not consent you can rely on, and you are the one holding the file. If the person is not available to sign, the answer is no, and the answer being no is sometimes the most professional thing you will do that month.
The position worth taking
Disclose what you used. Be able to explain which parts are yours and prove it with layers and project files. Deliver labelled assets where a viewer could be misled. Get consent in writing for any real person.
And price by what the work does, not by how long it took. That last point is the practical answer to the anxiety underneath this whole subject: a tool that halves your production time halves an hourly invoice and leaves a project fee exactly where it was.
Before you move on