What to write down before you start

Why the contract carries the weight

Everything in this module has ended at "unsettled" or "depends on the country". That is not a reason for paralysis. It is the ordinary condition of commercial work, and the ordinary answer is to write down what the parties have agreed rather than to rely on a default nobody can state.

The terms below are short, and raising them makes you look like somebody who has done this before.

The clauses worth having

Disclosure of use. State that AI tools may be used and in what capacity. Some clients have policies — many public sector, pharmaceutical, financial and news organisations restrict or prohibit it — and finding that out at delivery is the expensive way.

What you warrant, and what you do not. Warrant what you can: that you have the necessary licences for the tools used, that you have carried out stated checks, that you are not aware of any infringement. Do not warrant that the work is free of any third-party right, because nobody can establish that about generated material.

Ownership and its limits. Assign whatever rights you have. Say plainly that purely generated elements may not attract copyright in some jurisdictions, and that exclusivity in those elements cannot be guaranteed. If exclusivity matters, agree the route — substantial human authorship, trademark registration, or commissioning original artwork.

Third-party material. List it: stock, references, fonts, music, generated elements, and the licence for each. This is the record that answers every later question.

Confidentiality of inputs. If the client's material will pass through a hosted service, say so, and confirm whether that service trains on inputs. For sensitive work, commit to local processing and mean it.

Likeness and voice. If any real person is depicted or heard, attach their consent. Say who obtained it and what it covers.

Disclosure obligations. Who is responsible for labelling at publication, and in what form. This is increasingly a legal duty and it is frequently nobody's job by default.

Liability cap and what is excluded. Standard commercial practice and doubly worth having here.

What happens on a claim. Who notifies whom, within what period, and who controls the response. Your vendor indemnity probably has notification conditions; make sure your client contract does not prevent you meeting them.

The conversation to have at the start

Most of this fits into one exchange at the briefing, and it takes five minutes:

• Does the client have a policy on AI use?
• Does the work need to be protectable, and in which markets?
• Will any real person be depicted?
• Where will it be published, and who is labelling it?
• Is any of the input material confidential?

The answers determine the whole approach. A client who needs a protectable exclusive mark for three markets is a different job from one who needs forty social images by Friday, and the difference is decided before you open any tool.

The record to keep

Repeated through this course because it answers everything: model and version, prompts and seeds, reference images with sources and licences, what was done by hand, layered files, the licences and terms in force at the time, consents, and the disclosure as published.

A folder per job. Ten minutes across the whole project. It is the difference between answering a question in five minutes and reconstructing a year of work from memory.

Pricing, briefly

One practical note because it comes up immediately. Clients who know generation is involved will ask for a lower price. The honest answer is that the generation is a fraction of the work, and that what they are buying — the judgement, the composition, the finishing, the rights position, the accountability — is unchanged.

Pricing by time spent invites exactly this argument and loses it. Pricing by the value of the deliverable does not. The freelancing course in this track goes through this properly; the connection to this module is that the rights and disclosure work described here is real professional labour, it is what makes the deliverable safe to use, and it belongs in the price rather than being absorbed silently.

None of this is legal advice and none of it substitutes for a professional where the amounts justify one. What it is, is the list of things that cause disputes, written down before they do.