Should a client be told when AI wrote the first draft of listing copy

The thing that decides it for me is what I'm buying. If I hire someone for judgment about what to say, the drafting tool doesn't matter. If I hire someone because I can't write, and it turns out a free tool can write, then I overpaid and I'd want to know.

That is the split, and it is worth putting one line in a scope document over it: drafts may be AI assisted, all copy is edited and approved by the person delivering it. Clients rarely ask a follow up question once that line is there, and disclosure tends to cost less than people fear, mostly because clients already assume some AI involvement.

I came out of tools, so I lean toward the wrench one. Nobody asks what saw I used. But a saw doesn't make the cut for you, and that's where the comparison falls apart a bit.

Clients generally want to know, and then want the price to reflect it, and those two wants are the same want wearing a hat.

Getting licensed right now and I've been drafting my own listing copy to practice. What I've noticed is the AI draft is fine at the shape and bad at the specific thing that makes a unit worth seeing. It won't tell you the back bedroom gets afternoon light because it has never stood in the back bedroom. So a provider who charges for standing in the room is charging for something real regardless of how the paragraph got typed.

@ryanmck27 that's the part I keep coming back to. The value is in the site visit and the taste, and the sentence assembly is the cheap part now. If a provider prices as if sentence assembly is the expensive part they'll get squeezed whether they disclose or not.

For a portfolio of this size, what should be disclosed isn't the tool, it's whether a human read the output against the actual unit. AI-drafted copy has been known to describe a second bathroom that doesn't exist. That's not a style problem, that's a listing accuracy problem, and depending on the state a materially wrong listing statement can turn into a real complaint against the licensee, so it's worth checking with the broker on how that state handles it.

@tonyv88 the phantom bathroom is the strongest argument for disclosure I've read. If I know AI drafted it I know where to look for errors.

Disclosure tends to be a business decision rather than a moral one. A common pattern among agencies that disclose openly is that most retainers renew at the same rate once told, a smaller share push for a reduction and get held to the original price, and the rest never respond to that part of the message at all. What matters for @raj_mehta14 is that a provider who discloses probably isn't cheaper because of the AI. She's cheaper because she's priced lower, and she's comfortable enough with her process to talk about it openly.

Buyer side, small scale. I'd vote disclose because I don't have the volume to know what good looks like yet, and the more I know about how it was made the faster I learn.

Positions on this tend to flip over time. It's easy to assume it's nobody's business, until a client finds out from a subcontracted freelancer instead of from the person who hired them, and that conversation is much worse than an upfront disclosure would have been. That's the real cost. Disclosure is cheap when the timing is chosen and expensive when someone else chooses it.

@monica_tran3 found out how? That's the detail I'd want, because the way it comes out seems to matter more than the fact itself.