Update: Edited in response to Latitude's
announcement.
Many people are alarmed that the automated content flagging & filtering feature, which developers had rolled out unannounced over the past couple days, has been implicitly confirmed in the announcement to be monitoring users' unpublished Scenarios and Adventures. This is seen by many in the community as a major red flag of an intrusion into our privacy.
As such, I would like to propose that, in order to balance protection of the community's exposure to illicit NSFW content vs. respect for the community's privacy rights, unsolicited monitoring of content - be it automated or otherwise - should be limited to
only the following:
- Full review of a Scenario's form contents when its owner toggles to publish it (i.e. Title, Description, Prompt, Memory, Author's Note, Quests, Tags, Scripts & World Info, recursively iterating down into each of the Scenario's Options)
- Full review of a published Scenario's form contents when its owner modifies the published content.
- Full review of an Adventure's publicly viewable content when a writer toggles to publish it.
- Full review of a published Adventure's publicly viewable content when a writer modifies existing content.
- Real-time monitoring of newly generated text content within a published Adventure.
- Real-time monitoring of multiplayer Adventures' contents.
- Real-time monitoring of all posted comments throughout the site.
What should
not be monitored, reviewed nor filtered:
- Form contents of unpublished Scenarios.
- Text of unpublished Adventures.
- Contents of Scenarios & Adventures when they are unpublished with immediate effect until they are republished again.
The following situations should be the
only exceptions with regards to moderation & filtering of unpublished content:
- The unpublished Scenario's owner contacts Latitude's team for support, following which support staff explicitly requests for access and the owner grants permission in reply.
- The unpublished Adventure's writer contacts Latitude's team for support, or reports newly generated content, following which support staff explicitly requests for access and the owner grants permission in reply.
- A law enforcement authority issues a legally enforceable order to Latitude's team to access published & unpublished Scenarios & Adventures by specifically targeted user(s).
Which regards to the third exception mentioned above, I would suggest the following:
- The legal order should be treated akin to any physical search warrant, and users' relevant rights should be respected accordingly.
- Targeted user(s) should be notified in advance prior to the commencement of the legally mandated access and review of their content. The notification should be considered fair warning to cease and desist any questionable behavior.
- Platform moderators should be notified that such a legal order has been issued prior to the Latitude team's execution of the order.
- For transparency & accountability, Latitude should release a public announcement to the AI Dungeon community immediately after the legal order is fulfilled, informing the community of the order and providing traceable and verifiable proof of the order's authenticity.
- Latitude should keep the community updated on their own assessment of the review's results, as well as the outcome of the legal investigation as far as they are permitted to do so.
Disclaimer: I am not a legal expert, so the relevant wording for this particular exception can be adjusted for legal compliance reasons. However, the bottom-line is that this exception should apply
only to specifically targeted user(s). Legal orders targeting swaths of the community without limiting itself to specifically named user(s) should be
rejected as a violation of the community's privacy rights by legal authorities.
Note: Worlds are not mentioned in this submission as I rarely use them, and is thus unfamiliar with their functionality. Therefore, I am unable to make effective suggestions about this particular subject. However, the general principles regarding the protection of and respect for users' privacy should be applied in a similar manner.