437 - Creating an AI Policy for your Web Design Biz

In my community, Web Designer Pro, we’re wrapping up a challenge on “Creating an AI Policy” for our web businesses. This is based largely off of frustrations and challenges that members have been having with clients bringing them AI designs that they want them to code and host, or taking their hard-earned and human-first designs, then using AI to manipulate them into generic slop.

That’s what led us to recently kick off this community challenge, and in this episode, I’ll walk you through the AI Policy starter template that we came up with so you can use it for your web design business!

It’s below. Completely free, on me.

Again, please do not copy and paste it verbatim…use it as a starting point and add your own flare without using AI, ideally!!

Head to the show notes to get all links and resources we mentioned, along with a full transcription of this episode at joshhall.co/437

Transcript

Why Web Designers Need An AI Policy

Josh Hall 0:00

Hello, my fine friend. I'm betting you woke up at 2 or 3 a.m. last night and wondered to yourself, I wonder if it's worthwhile having a policy for how I'm using AI in my web design business. An AI policy, something that I can refer back to and share with clients who are sending me AI designs or taking my designs and AI slopifying them or sending me generic ChatGPT content. If only I could have some guidance on creating this type of AI policy. If only someone was out there who had a template for me to base my own AI policy on. If only there was a community of web designers who are already doing this and who I can learn from and pull from. If only, well, my friend, your day of redemption for an AI policy is here. Because that's what this episode's about. This is a solo episode, and it is based off of a challenge that at the time of releasing this were about to be done with Inside of Web Designer Pro. Last week we talked about this live Inside of Web Designer Pro on our weekly call instead of doing a typical coaching call. Yeah, we came up with this idea and we had kind of a live round table and had a lot of back and forth and discussions and shared ideas and kind of started the rough drafts of our own AI policies together. And this has stemmed from a lot of conversations I've had in the recent months, particularly for designers of all sorts, web designers, graphic designers, and God knows print designers who are having clients send them AI slop, generic copy, or for my dear poor print design world folks, RGB documents that are 72 DPI resolution that are not formatted for print or do not have bleed lines. If you know, you know. So what we found out in Web Designer Pro here together is what we're gonna do moving forward is have this AI policy page. And we're gonna have some links for this one, uh, including I'm gonna give you the template. This is kind of like a nice starting point. I'm actually this week gonna be making an official playbook that will live inside of Web Designer Pro, but you can at least get the template for this. That way you don't have to write everything yourself. I'm gonna guide you through what's in this template, which again is kind of a starting point for you in your web design business. This is what Web Designer Pro members have as a starting point based off of what we came up with, although everyone's customizing it for their own business and their own tool sets as far as uh AI goes. But yeah, I want to give you a starting point on me as a listener of the show. The show notes for this one are going to be at joshhall.co slash 437. That's going to include this AI policy template that you can use and make your own. And it's also going to include a link to my AI policy. I just created one for Web Designer Pro. I need to do one for josh hall.co as well, but I wanted to start with the one for Web Designer Pro. I'll share kind of what I put in there as well. And, you know, with Web Designer Pro, my AI policy looks different because I'm using AI in a different way for community and coaching and courses than you would for you know design services.

When Clients Send AI Slop

Josh Hall 3:30

Um but I think it'll be helpful. So what I'll do here is walk you through this template that is, again, completely free and available for you. Go to joshhall.co slash 437 to grab that. Um, but there's a few main areas that I would recommend. Honestly, I would recommend getting this up this week, even just as an initial draft, because this isn't going to be a page that you're going to promote. It's not going to be a page that you reference all the time. It's only going to be there basically as more of a disclosure for you and your business and to address questions that clients have now and in the future regarding AI without it being personal. And that's kind of the real basis on where this idea came out of is in our uh Web Designer Pro mastermind group, we have a small group of Web Designer Pros where we meet every other week and have these small private intimate calls. And one of our ones recently was one of our members just shared some understandable frustrations about the fact that their client took one of their designs and basically fed it into I think it was ChatGPT and made basically like AI slopified versions of this design and was producing it publicly. And you know, similar things have happened for many years when it comes to like you creating a website and then a client gets a hold of it, or you know, has at has access to to change the copy and design and they just butcher it. And it's happened if you create a Canva template for a client and then they just butcher it and are pumping those things out in social media. But there's something that feels definitely, I understand, more personal and violating, I think, in some ways, especially from an intellectual property standpoint when clients are using your designs, your human-first, heartfelt designs, and then just basically letting an AI tool just manipulate it and yeah, just in many cases, slopify it. So that was one of the many base like situations that became the basis for this. And yeah, something that I'm just seeing left and right. I'll link this in the show notes, but I'm sure you're seeing this too, because we're seeing it left and right in pro. Clients are starting to build designs with Claw Design or Chat GPT or whatever tool or lovable, whatever. And they're taking it to web designers and saying, hey, I created a new website, can you put this up for me? And they're not understanding number one, it may be like super generic and absolute slop and garbage. Number two, it may be a detriment to their SEO rankings. And number three, they don't know how to host it or they don't know the intricacies of the contact form submissions and what's already in place if it's a redesign. All these things are happening left and right now. One of my uh actually, one of our mastermind members, shout out to Christine at Copper Coin Design, has a new AI service that's currently basically a retainer for when clients try to do AI stuff and then it just looks terrible or they don't know what to do. Currently, this is subject to change. This is going to evolve. But Christine's AI website page is called AI Website Help. And the tagline we kind of came up with together is this is kind of one of the cool things about the mastermind that I'm loving is we we came up with this, a lot of this copy together on a on a coaching call. And Christine's initial uh challenge with this was you know, she's getting clients sending over designs like this, and she's like, I don't know what to do with this. How like I can't know, I just can't go live with this. We even talked about hosting. I don't know what the specifications or features are or what the future of scalability and maintainability looks like with this. So on this page that you're welcome to reference, this will be linked over at joshhall.co slash 437. Um, it's AI website help. Built build it with AI. We'll help you finish it right. So now Christine has a team behind her who is willing to do this on a case-by-case basis, but it's kind of more of a consultation

Where To Get The Template

Josh Hall 7:50

to kick off. And then as of now, from what I know, kind of more of a consultative retainer style rate. Um, but it's also a good chance to do an upsell if clients are sending designs and you say, look, here's what's okay about this. Like, yeah, there's some okay design elements, and we can take this and either redesign or implement into our own system, but we're not going to maybe, you know, literally use the code base that this is built on because we haven't even touched on security and privacy and accessibility and everything with this as well. So a lot of aspects to web design that clients just don't understand. And again, it's not their job too, they're not web designers, it's your job. But I want to help you with these conversations, particularly when you feel, again, a violated or you feel pissed off that you're like, no, I'm not going to use your shitty AI design. I'm the designer. I'm the strategist. So it takes the um, yeah, takes the personal vitriol out. If you can just say, well, this doesn't align with our AI policy, or in our AI policy, link below, this is what we'll do. Or if it ever comes to some sort of legal dispute, which is going to be really interesting as more and more of these AI tools, the the where the you know the legal aspect of copy and plagiarism and IP comes into place. Um, disclaimer, I'm not a lawyer, but to my knowledge, I don't think there is a way to like legally pursue. Let me know if I'm wrong. Ann Capuza, one of our OG members of Pro, who's kind of our uh attorney, uh attorney web designer. Um, if you're listening, Ann, let me know if you know something that I don't. But I'm not aware of any like way to legally pursue somebody if they take your design and use AI to manipulate it. Just like again, I don't know if there was a legal way 10 years ago to pursue somebody who took your design and then took it in a DIY platform and build it, like rebuild it themselves, which did happen to me by the way. It happened a couple times where I'm like, wow, that design looks familiar. Wow, that design looks awfully familiar. So it's just now it's just prompt-based. So, anywho, that is an intricate intro uh for the foundation of this AI policy. So, what I'm gonna do is read you the template that I have available for you at joshhall.co slash uh 437. So make sure you pick that up. But I would there, there's five, eh, four or five main areas. I'll cover those real quick and then we'll dive into each one.

The Four Parts Of A Policy

Josh Hall 10:20

Number one, I want to encourage you to create an AI mission statement. This is really just about how you and your business feel about AI. And some of you may be early adopters and are really AI heavy, and some of you are a little more like me and a lot of Web Presenter Pros and are a little either late adopters or more hesitant to just rely on AI. But I think it's important to these days have an AI mission statement because that's kind of the umbrella for all the tools that you're gonna use and how you're gonna go about implementing AI. We're not anti-AI. This is not an anti-AI policy. This is just more of a disclosure about how you're using AI. And I think the genesis of that is your mission statement and how you feel about AI in your work. Number two, I want to encourage that you have a section about how you're using AI. You can disclose practically how you're using it. This could be a separate section or it could be under that, and that is our AI tool stack, basically disclosing the main tools you're currently using with AI. And of course, this is always going to evolve, but clients are probably gonna want to know if you're using AI, like what type of AI you're using. And then the maybe most important one here is a client AI policy. If you are to a point where you will not accept AI content and designs from clients, then you need to disclose that. And again, if your clients like, if they're all pissed off because you're like, no, I'm not gonna take that, and they're like, what? How you know, like this is just the way of the times. It's not personal, it's our policy. And here's why. And that's what you disclose in the AI policy. Um, so we'll get into that. And then finally, I would also recommend disclosing how your team is using AI. Because remember, these standards and processes and even your mission that you have in place, that may be personal to you, but that doesn't always mean that your team is going to uh adhere to that, especially if you're using contractors and they're kind of left to their own devices. So may need to kind of make some standardization in your team policy as well. So that sounds a little scary, I bet, but this AI policy is literally just over one page, and that is more than enough for you to tweak it and make your own. Disclaimer, I probably don't need to say this, although I'm sure I do for someone out there. Do not write an AI policy with an AI tool. Do not write your AI policy with an AI tool. Now, can you use it to fill in some gaps and help you think of some other ideas that maybe you and your business haven't covered? Absolutely. But unironically, I don't want you to rely on AI to write your AI policy. And that's because we don't want this generalized. We don't want what's potentially already out there. We want this to be personalized to you. And I've

Write A Human First Mission

Josh Hall 13:15

been working really hard on this, and I think it's pretty damn good. So that's what we're gonna dive into, starting with the mission statement. Here is the example mission statement provided for you in the template at joshhall.co slash fork37. Web Designer Pro members, uh, make sure you get this done before tomorrow for our coaching call if you're catching this the day it comes out, because we are gonna share our policies and go live together. And our challenge that's going on right now. Join Web Designer Pro today at Webdesenter Pro.com if you want to be a part of the cool club. So, this example mission statement. We aim to provide a human first design experience for all of our clients and to help our clients stand out, grow, and succeed in a world of AI slop, generic copy, messaging, positioning, and presence. Little wordy. This is just kind of I took my idea of my mission statement that I'll share later for pro, and then also the missions that we kind of came up with together that I saw live during our call last week. Um, so this is just kind of of a mix of all of that. So, of course, tighten it, tweak it. For you, it may be more design first, or maybe more copy first, or SEO first, or um you may be like industry related, especially if you're serving like a niche, and like that's where stuff's gonna be really interesting. Um, so tweak that to you, of course. And in the back half of this mission statement, again, as an example that you can base your own off of, please don't copy and paste this exactly, make it your own. Um, but the second half is our goal for our clients is to stand out in a generic online world by showcasing their authentic vibe, their voice, and unique selling point through their website, and to help them stand out from their competition for years to come. And I smiled pretty big when I came up with that line because I did not get AI help on this, and I did not review any other statements or policies around AI. I just kind of based off of what I see and and what I feel and what I see happening with pros, I think one thing that's gonna be interesting is you are gonna have an edge if you are not reliant on AI for your clients. If, again, not anti-AI, it's just it just means that you're not getting down to the generic Chat GPT responses because pretty soon you're gonna see a lot of websites looking the same, sounding the same, and acting the same. And we're actually already there. How many times have you seen an AI site that's like, oh, that's an AI site? Oh, they have navigating this customer challenge in their copy AI. You know, there's little tells, sometimes big tells, that it's all AI. So come up with a mission statement. How do you feel towards AI in your business? I love that term, human-first design. And you could make an alternate version of this or get a little more granular on how you're actually implementing AI in the next section, which is how you're

Disclose How You Use AI

Josh Hall 16:05

using AI. This is a disclosure on the different aspects of AI. Now, you don't need to make this a small book. I would make it super scannable, but just try to cover the bases on how you're using before you share your tool stack. For example, you may say, we are a human or we are human first in design, strategy, and customer experience. That's a big one, by the way. Are customers going to be expected to talk to an AI chatbot or are you or your support team? Uh, do you have an AI agent that is handling support? You need to disclose that. Um, and using AI primarily internally to help with standardized workflows, automations, and ongoing tasks that leave our energy to provide the best creative and customer experience for our clients. I like that because it just says that most of our AI is going to be used behind the scenes for us, but the way we do use it for you is going to free us up to be the most creative and give you the best experience as a client. And you could say things like, we use AI to leverage our superpowers or our skill set or expertise. Maybe expertise. I like that a little more. Let's do expertise. I'm going to change that. I'm looking at the template. Let's say expertise. And to free us up for our best work. I just I think it's important to drill that down. I I may have duplicated this sentence in a way, but um the big thing here is not to be reliant on AI to do the work for us. Let me adjust that too. Not to be reliant on AI to do the most important creative work for us. I'll just say work to give it an overall term. So yeah, that's kind of like a di, you know, it's not the mission, it is the like practically how you're doing it. But there's more specifics that you can get into by disclosing your AI tool stack. I would be really upfront about this. If you are using granola, or I think Whisperflow has live note-taking now, right? You gotta disclose that. Just like on Zoom, it states like recording in progress. That sounds sounded pretty close, right? Um, or you see like a note taker on AI, you gotta disclose that for clients if they're not aware of it. And again, you know, it's unlikely that a client is going to pursue legal action, but one thing I would state here too, either below your tool stack or maybe above the tool stack, is a notice of confidentiality with client data. And what I mean by that is if you're using a note taker to record a client call and they're saying specific numbers or confidential information about their team, and you take that transcription and put it into Claude or Chat GPT to get a summary and an action plan or timestamps, there may be confidential data that they don't want in that LLM. And this is a very important deal. And I don't know. Again, there may be legal repercussions to this if it's not disclosed, just like there is with accessibility

Tool Stack And Confidentiality Safeguards

Josh Hall 19:05

and privacy and data. So, you know, AI is a whole nother wing, isn't it? Isn't it great these days, of complexity when it comes to data privacy? So um I would disclose like I may, you know, we may use a transcript, but what I have here for you, if you want to take this and run with it, is you gotta announce that you disable the setting to train LLMs with any confidential data. And I don't use ChatGPT, a paid version anymore, because I use the paid Claude. But like in Claude, you can go into the settings and you can enable or disable using the Claude chat to train its model. So make sure you number one, do that, and number two, disclose that as well. Um, here's just an example that this is kind of my this is kind of an average web designer setup, but again, you may have more or less AI tools. Maybe you're using Cloud for strategy calls and summaries and copy outlines and refinements or coding assistance or development work. Maybe you're using Chat GPT for ideation, brain dumps, or maybe even finding gaps in content, design, SEO, or development work. Those could be two and one, basically. Um use your builder of choice AI, which most builders all have AI to some degree now. Maybe for wireframing or basic layouts, repetitive design tasks, or if you are doing some sort of templated design, you may need to disclose that um we use AI for like, you know, the initial design or starter sites. Um AI if you're take if you're recording on Zoom and again for note-taking action plans, transcriptions. Maybe you're using Figma and you're using the AI feature in Figma for design inspiration or wireframing or design elements. Maybe you're using Canva AI to help create design elements inside of their graphics or design assets, or if you're doing any sort of social media marketing for clients and you're creating templates. Um I would disclose that as well. But I would also make it, you know, especially if you are aligned with Web Designer Pro members, which was unanimous that everyone is human first in design. We're not relying on AI and tweaking it. We are we are design first and using AI as a compliment. Um, I would specify that as well. And then yeah, make sure you add the confidential the confidentiality data for your for your client data in the fact that you know you are not using their data, confidential or private, to train any AI. Uh and I would also put intentionally or unknowingly in there. Or or like so literally how I said

Setting Boundaries On Client AI

Josh Hall 21:45

it is this your data is not being used to train in any AI LLM model or intentionally or unknowingly shared publicly via any AI tools in our tool stack. We disable the setting to train LLMs with any data we. Put into our AI tools. So got yourself covered if for any reason you got a wild client who's like trying to pursue you for using their information elsewhere. Again, the big one, the big, big, big, big, big one here is the client AI policy. This is completely up to you. So you need to decide what you're willing to take on and not take on. Again, we're going to link below to Christine's CopperCoinDesign.com page, their AI website help page. But, you know, you may not even be there. You may be like, I'm absolutely not taking anything on that's created by AI. You know, clients welcome to give us ideas for inspiration, but we're not gonna, uh, it's not a part of our standards and best practices to do that. But the client AI policy, here's an example. We will guide you through our proven AI prompts, if necessary, for creating content and copy. So you may have a prompt in JetGPT that helps clients create content if you have some sort of content guide or something like that, which is really common and totally fine. But you may say, we will not accept AI content and designs to revise, refine, or code them to our standards. Clients may not use a big one. This is addressing the situation that happened to one of our pro members who basically their client ran with their design and just AI-ified it. Clients may not use our A IP in human first design's strategy. Oh, our IP in our human first design strategy and copy to be reworked, AI slopified, or using an AI tool unless given permission, parameters, or guidelines by our team. So again, I don't know if there is any legalities behind that if somebody does, but at least it's in your policy. And if you see somebody doing that, you could basically issue a warning and say, like, hey, it's a part of our AI policy. You agreed to when you worked with us that you will not use our design and AI designs because it's it's violating it and it's uh manipulating it. And then if you do have a service, I would link it there and say, we do have an AI service in place for redesigning an existing site or design system previously built by AI. But I would just specify, like, you know, maybe that's limited or maybe it's open and closed. Um, the other thing you could do as well is in your main web design business contract, I would just link to your AI policy. And I guess you're probably curious about this. I should have stated this early on. I just recommend having an AI policy page. This could be in your about us page. It could be in one terms and conditions page. But I think maybe for crawling, as long as you're cool with AI having this, it's probably worthwhile having this as an indexed page. That way AI knows your stance. You don't have to. In fact, some pro members mentioned they may want to hide this and just keep it, you know, for when needed or more of like a hidden page that's not indexed on Google.

Team Standards And Where To Publish

Josh Hall 25:05

But I currently now have it as an AI policy page, like a separate thing. But you could condense this in with your privacy policy or your terms. Um, but yeah, make sure you have all that stuff up. And then finally, the team AI policy. And what I stated here for reference to get you going is our team is human first in all things design, copy, strategy, and customer service, and follows our mission, tool stack, and general principles and ethics for AI. They may use AI, our team, you may say our team. Let's do that. Our team may use AI to summarize client action plans, um, create workflows and to assist with tasks that can be automated or better serve our clients, and for filling in gaps in design, development, and copy. Um, how whatever works for you there, but definitely gonna want to probably make a team policy, and that's gonna kind of lead to the standards that you have for your team. So uh that's it. There we go, friends. AI policy. Get it going. Web Designer Pro members, I hope to see you if you're catching this the day it comes out tomorrow for our coaching call, where we will just briefly go over this and share our AI policies. That'll be the end of our challenge for this one. Just remember, this does not need to be perfect. It is 100% a first draft, but just get it up there and it'll take the personal side of things out when the client inevitably does come to you with an AI design and you say, oops, it's out of our policy, or they take your design and slopify it and you say, oop, out of our policy, take it down, you jerk. Um and just yeah, just it looks more professional too. When clients are asking you, like, how do you use AI? You can say, Oh, well, please review our AI policy. They'll be like, Wow, you are a pro. You are a pro web designer. It seems like you're a part of a group called Web Designer Pro. And I hope you are a part of our community in Web Designer Pro if this kind of thing is of interest to you. Only if you're interested in making a lot more money and having some dang fun and being surrounded by the best web designer people on the internet. Oh my goodness. Pro is on fire right now. I'm not just saying that, it really is. Uh, things are just cooking. I'm having maybe more fun in Pro right now than I've had in years. Just got some new life going on. It's been awesome. Something is in the water in

Final Encouragement And Web Designer Pro Invite

Josh Hall 27:25

Edmonton, by the way. We've had three new members join from Edmonton uh here recently. Awesome. I'm here for it. Um Michelle, our resident SEO and copy specialist in Pro, who had a lot of good insight on this on our call last week, said she wonders if there's a billboard that I put up in Edmonton for Pro because yeah, just people popping into Pro from Edmonton. I said no, but I'm here for it. I don't know what's going on, but I love it. They're having a meetup here soon in a couple weeks. So oh, it's freaking awesome. Um, Pro, guys, it's here for you. If you've been on the fence, now is an amazing time to jump in, especially as we lead into the fall, because we got some very fun challenges and some things ahead to help you grow your business and to get ready for the inevitable fall push for clients. So we may or may not be cooking up a bit of a marketing boost challenge that we're gonna do for all members of Pro together and give each other some accountability and to just give you some clarity and some confidence to market. And again, make a lot more money and have more margin and have more profit. And most importantly, have more freedom, have more fun. Oh, by the way, when you join the Web Designer Pro community, you get a coaching boost from yours truly. The coaching tier is currently closed, it'll reopen probably some point in the fall, TBD, but you can join the community and you'll still have access to me and the community through our calls and in the forums. And I will DM you personally when you join to give you a coaching boost. And I can help you with offers, pricing, marketing strategy, getting clients, scaling, wherever you're stuck or whatever challenge, little or big that you want to share with me, I will help you with a one-time coaching boost when you join. Limited time offer, but um yeah, webdesignerpro.com is where to go. Jump into the community. Only only if you want to have a support system of the best, awesome, most incredible web designers all over the world behind you, and only if you want to make more money. And because of that, consequence, you're gonna end up in a higher tax bracket. So you also need to be prepared to pay more taxes. But um thanks to Maggie for her copy on that, which is below the pricing table when you join Pro. Uh, but yeah, awesome guys. I hope this helps. Josh Hall.co slash 437 is where to go. The template will be there. And I really hope to see you in Web Designer Pro uh when you're ready. Hopefully you're ready now again, if you're ready to up level here. And I hope this helps because this is the kind of thing that we're doing in Pro that is keeping us really ahead of the curve. Like, do you know of another community or course that's has an AI policy like this? If you do, I'd love to see it as a comment at joshhall.co slash 347. But I'm guessing you don't have anybody in mind because WebCenter Pro is number one. It's where to go. All right, guys. I will see you in the show notes and I will see you on the next episode. And we're gonna continue having so much fun. And thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Appreciate you being subscribed. Got a lot of great messages recently from listeners from the show. And um, yeah, I just really want to say thank you for listening. So, gosh, 2019, what are we at? Eight years? Over eight years. Closing in on eight years for the show. And we're definitely gonna have to celebrate and do some fun on that. So, all right, friends, cheers.