A client thinks your art is AI. Here's what to say.

The message usually comes in sideways. Not "did you use AI," which almost nobody has the nerve to type, but something like: "Quick question from our brand team about the process on this one, do you have any of the working files?" Or a Slack from the art director at 4:50 on a Friday: "Can you walk me through how you approached the hands?" You know what it means. Your stomach knows what it means. And the first thing most people do is the thing that loses the job.

Don't defend. Ask.

The instinct is to fire back a paragraph. How dare they, twenty years in the industry, here's my portfolio from 2009. Every word of it may be true and every word of it reads as guilty. A person with nothing to hide is curious, not wounded. So the first reply is short and it's a question:

"Happy to. Was there something specific that prompted it? Helps me know what to send."

Two things happen. You find out what they actually saw, which is often something fixable and rarely what you feared. A too-smooth gradient. Six fingers you genuinely didn't notice at 3am. A background texture that happened to look like the one in every generated image that month. And you've made them say it, which means they have to put the concern into words, and half the time the words are "honestly nothing, someone upstairs asked us to check everything now." That's not about you. It's about the last vendor.

Occasionally the answer is worse: they've been shown a "detector" result. Those tools are wrong constantly, the false-positive rate on hand-drawn work is well documented, and you can say so, but not yet. First get the evidence in front of them.

The three replies

Once you know what triggered it, you're picking one of three responses. They're not scripts to paste. They're shapes.

The file dump. For a client who's asking in good faith and just needs something to forward to whoever asked them. Send the layered source file, the Procreate timelapse if there is one, and two or three work-in-progress screenshots with their original timestamps. Say what each thing is in one line. Don't editorialise. "Here's the working file, the recording Procreate makes as you go, and a few progress shots from Tuesday and Wednesday. Shout if they want anything else." The lack of drama is the message.

The walkthrough. For a client who's uncertain and a little embarrassed to be asking. Offer a fifteen-minute call and share your screen. Open the file. Scrub the timelapse. Show them the reference board, the rejected thumbnails, the layer where you fixed the hands. This one takes more of your time and it's worth every minute, because nobody who has watched you scrub through your own layers ever asks again, and they tend to tell the next art director that you're the one who'll show your work.

The boundary. For the client who's not asking, but accusing, and who won't be moved by anything you send. You'll know this one because the evidence you offer gets waved away and the tone doesn't change. Send the file dump anyway, once, so the record shows you did, and then stop. "I've sent the working files and the recording. If there's a specific concern I'm glad to address it; otherwise I'll treat the piece as delivered." Some clients are looking for a reason not to pay. Evidence doesn't fix that. Contracts and invoices do, and that's a different article.

The thing nobody says out loud

Every piece of evidence above can, in theory, be faked. A layered file can be built over a generated base. A timelapse can be a tracing. A determined person can manufacture a process by going through the motions of one. If the client thinks about it hard enough they know this, and if you're honest with yourself you know it too, and it's the reason these conversations have a helpless quality on both sides.

Say it. Not defensively, just as a fact: "I'll be straight with you, there's no proof of process that can't be faked by someone willing to do the work twice. What I can show you is that this one wasn't." Naming the limit is disarming. It signals you've thought about the problem from their side, which is more than most vendors have done, and it moves the conversation from "prove a negative" to "here's what I've got," which is a conversation you can actually win.

Making sure it doesn't happen twice

You can't stop clients being nervous. This is the year they're nervous. What you can do is make sure the nervousness never becomes a phone call, and the way to do that is to answer the question before it's asked.

Every delivery goes out with its process attached. Not as a big deal, as a habit, one line in the email and a folder next to the final. Source file, timelapse if the app makes one, a couple of dated progress shots. It takes four minutes and it reframes you permanently: you're not the illustrator who got asked, you're the one who sends the receipts.

Some people go a step further and keep a running record while they work, so there's a third-party timestamped account of the file growing over the hours it took. DrawDog does that and we obviously think it's worth having, but it's the habit that matters, not the tool. An illustrator who delivers evidence unprompted, every time, with the same calm one-liner, stops getting the Friday-afternoon Slack. The suspicion doesn't disappear from the industry. It just stops landing on you.

And if it does land, once, on a piece you're proud of, remember that the person asking is usually more uncomfortable than you are. Ask what they saw. Send what you have. Keep the tone the tone of someone with nothing to hide, because you're the only one in the conversation who knows for certain that you don't.