Freelance writers: what to do when you are accused of using AI

You write for clients on contract, and a client has decided your work looks machine-written.

What is at stake

An unpaid invoice, and a client relationship you cannot afford to lose by being difficult about it.

Your evidence position

You have a contract, a paper trail of briefs and revisions, and usually a version history in whatever you drafted in. The contract is the strongest lever: most freelance agreements warrant original work, not detector scores.

Do this first

Ask in writing which tool produced which result and what threshold was applied. Detector outputs are rarely reproducible on demand, and the question alone ends a surprising number of disputes.

The trap

The "must pass AI detector" clause. It converts a promise about your process into an outcome warranty on someone else's software. Do not accept it, or if it is already signed, argue the contract language rather than the score.

Related pages that will help

Freelance writer disputes usually turn on the same few things: what a detector actually claims about its own accuracy, which pieces of evidence survive scrutiny, and whether a contract put the risk on you. The pages below cover each.