AI Policy
Last updated: July 2026
Before I ever touched an AI tool, I spent years sitting in living rooms with brand-new parents, asking permission before I picked up their baby.
If that sounds unrelated to website design, consider that birth work is full of opportunities for consent, trust building, and listening. You ask before you act. You explain what you're doing and why. You never assume that silence means yes.
So when AI became part of how I work (and it is very much part of how I work), I knew I didn't want clients finding out sideways, or wondering, or having to ask. This page is me telling you first.
The short version
I collaborate with AI tools on most of my work. I do not hand my work over to them.
That distinction matters more to me than almost anything else on this page. I'm protective — maybe stubbornly so since it slows me down — about attaching my name to things. If it has my name on it, or yours, a human brain (mine) shaped it, questioned it, revised it, and made the final call. AI helps me think and draft faster. It doesn't think for me, and it definitely doesn't get to decide what your business needs or how it should show up.
How AI actually shows up in a website project
When you hire me to design your website, AI is in the room for:
Drafting. I take the materials you give me (your intake answers, your services, the way you describe your own work) and I use AI to help turn all of that into first-draft copy faster than I could alone. The ideas and the voice come from you and from my read of you. AI helps get them onto the page.
Structure and brainstorming. Page layouts, headline options, "what's another way to say this" moments. AI is genuinely good at giving me six versions so I can pick the one that sounds like you (and toss the five that don't).
And here's where AI is not in the room:
Strategy. What your site needs to do, who it's talking to, what to lead with, that's all me, drawing on years of doing this work.
Judgment. Every draft gets read, questioned, and revised by an actual human before you ever see it. Plenty of AI output never survives contact with my editing pass.
Your approval. Nothing goes live without your review and sign-off. This is simply a part of my process. In my standard projects, copy is reviewed, revised, and locked with you before I build a single page.
The relationship. When you email me, you get me. There's no bot answering your questions or sitting in on our conversations.
These days my main collaborator is Claude. I've switched tools before over values questions (I wrote about canceling my ChatGPT subscription last year), and I'd do it again. Which tool I use matters less than how I use it, but for what it's worth, I choose deliberately.
Your materials and your data
This is the section I'd want to read first if I were you, so let me be plain about where things stand.
What I do now:
My AI conversations are excluded from model training. I've opted out on my account, which also means my conversation data is held under a much shorter retention window than the default (30d vs. 5y)
I strip identifying details where I can. When I'm working with your materials in an AI tool, I anonymize what doesn't need to be there.
Your materials are used for your project. Period. What you share with me doesn't get repurposed, fed into other projects, or turned into anything that isn't yours.
The more sensitive something is, the less likely it goes near an AI tool at all. Anything like login credentials, financial details, and personal stories that aren't mine to share stay out.
And here's the honest part: I don't have a formal, audited data-handling protocol yet. I'm actively building one. It's part of why I'm doing graduate work in AI management and policy. And as my practices get more rigorous, this page will change to reflect them.
What this means for you
If you hire me, you're hiring someone who works with AI openly, thinks about it carefully, and stays in the driver's seat. You'll get work that a human was accountable for at every step, made faster and often better by the tools I've spent years learning to use well.
And honestly, I am hopeful about where this AI tech is going. Not in a blind, techno-optimist way (I’m still reading the fine print and change my mind about tools when I need to) but I've watched AI take real friction out of my own business, and I think there's a genuinely good version of this for small business owners who've felt left out of the conversation so far. That's most of why I'm doing this work at all.
And if working with someone who collaborates with AI is a dealbreaker for you, truly, that's okay. I'd rather you know now than three emails in. I'm not the right designer for every project, and I have a lot of respect for people who've thought about this and landed somewhere different than I have.
But if you've got questions, please reach out. This is one of my favorite things to talk about. The whole reason this page exists is that I think you deserve to be able to ask, and to get a straight answer.
This page describes my working practices and values. The formal terms of any project live in your working agreement.