What to Say About AI in Your Marketing for Your Freelance Business [2024 Guide]

Freelancers who embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and can clearly explain to clients how they use it ethically and responsibly will have a strong competitive edge over freelancers who don’t. Here’s what to say about AI in your marketing to thrive in the era of AI.

Generative AI—a type of AI that can produce content like text, images, audio, and video in seconds—is everywhere these days. It’s reshaping the way freelancers—and our clients—work.

While many clients see generative AI as a magic way to produce lots of high-quality content fast and cheaply, it’s not. Generative AI can produce content fast. And generative AI can produce content cheaply.

Generative AI’s Dark Side

But generative AI can’t produce high-quality—or even decent—content. Generative AI has a dark side, including hallucinations, inaccurate content, and bias.

What generative AI does well is support or assist in content production. As freelancers, we need to understand this and educate our clients about this. And we need to clearly explain to clients how we use AI ethically and responsibly.

Along with its dark side, generative AI simply can’t do what a freelancer can do. It doesn’t have the expertise, judgement, or critical thinking skills of a freelance writer.

AI doesn’t have the subject matter expertise that is so important in many freelance writing projects. Even with the best prompts, AI doesn’t understand the context of the project or the client’s needs, preferences, and audience. And you can’t put any proprietary information into ChatGPT or any other AI tool because it will then use that information in responses to other users.

Content generated by AI doesn’t sound like a real person, or a real company, wrote it. It lacks empathy, creativity, and originality.

Learn more about problems with good uses of AI.

How Highlighting AI in Your Marketing will Help You

If you highlight your understanding and use of AI in your marketing, you’ll have a strong competitive edge over freelancers who don’t do this. And you’ll be able to help educate clients about what AI can and can’t do.

Build Trust by Being Transparent

Clients want to work with freelancers they can trust. Build this trust by being open and honest about your use of AI. This also ensures that clients understand how you’re using AI to add value to their work—and that you’re using AI ethically and responsibly.

Clearly explain how you use AI in your work and the benefits it provides. Address common concerns about its use.

Ask clients to share their opinions about and current use of AI for content. Encourage them to ask questions about your use of AI and express their concerns about it.

What to Say About AI in Your Marketing

Focus on the good uses of AI in creating content. AI is great for planning content and brainstorming ideas. It can very quickly summarize large amounts of text and provide concise summaries that capture the key points and main ideas. It can be a great starting place for a writing project. Also, AI can analyze content to ensure consistency in writing style, tone, voice and adherence to specific guidelines and optimize content for search engines.

AI in your marketing

Focus on the Benefits of Using AI

Highlight the benefits clients get when you use AI in your work for them.

Emphasize how AI-assisted writing will help you be more efficient, which adds value for your clients. Let clients know that you understand the ethical issues related to using AI and will use it ethically and responsibly.

Educate clients about the responsible use of AI by using the term “AI-assisted writing” (or whatever you do). This will show clients that you’re using AI as a tool, not to do the writing (editing, design, etc.) for you. Mention the benefits and limitations of AI-assisted work. Tell clients how you’ll combine AI and your experience and expertise to deliver content that’s relevant, accurate, engaging, and targeted to the needs of the client and their audiences.

Highlight your experience and expertise by explaining how you combine AI assistance with your expertise, judgment, and critical thinking skills to create content that is accurate, original, and empathetic (when appropriate). Emphasize the importance of the human touch and that you’ll write compelling content that sounds like a real person wrote it.

Mention that you’ll customize information generated by AI to meet the needs of your clients and their audience(s) by also using information:

About the client’s needs, perspectives, insights, and strategies
From your client’s subject matter experts.

Let clients know that know that AI is evolving fast and you’ll stay current with the latest trends and tools.

How to Highlight AI in Your LinkedIn Profile and Website

Highlight your understanding of AI and how you use in you LinkedIn profile and website. Once you’ve developed your content about this, you can also use it during conversations or meetings with potential clients and clients.

For example, my LinkedIn profile and my website both have the brief statement:

“I use AI-assisted medical writing ethically and responsibly to work more efficiently and provide my clients with more value.”

Then I include more details about:

How I use AI-assisted writing
How I combine AI with my experience as a writer and my knowledge of health and medicine
What AI can’t do.

On LinkedIn, include this information in your About section. If you use AI a lot, you can also mention this in your headline.

See what I say about AI in my LinkedIn profile
Lori De Milto

Show your interest in and expertise about AI by writing posts about AI-related articles, news, or insights on LinkedIn and responding to other people’s posts on AI. Learn more about AI by reading the posts of experts, following them, and signing up for their newsletters (as applicable).

On your website, include an AI statement on your home page with a link to a sub-page with details.

See what I say about AI on my website
Lori De Milto Writer for Rent LLC home page
Lori De Milto Writer for Rent LLC AI page

AI’s Impact on Freelance Work

Many freelancers are worried that AI will replace us. It won’t.

Content mills and some clients, those who only care about generating content, not the quality of the content, will stop using or limit their use of freelancers. But content mills and these clients are the low end of the freelance writing market. They didn’t pay much before AI and they’ll pay even less now.

The best clients—the ones who will pay us what we’re worth and treat us right—will use AI wisely. And they need freelance help to do this.

Freelance writers who want to survive the era of AI need to learn how to use AI. Continuously build your AI skills. Learn how to use the AI tools that are relevant to your work.

Using AI is a skill. Practice helps us build any skill. Experts say to just start experimenting with ChatGPT. I’ve been using another AI tool lately, Perplexity, which is better than ChatGPT for many things.

AI in Your Marketing and Your Freelance Work

AI will continue to evolve and be used more. If you want to thrive and not be left behind, you need to learn how to use AI ethically and responsibly and how to explain to clients how you use AI.