askael

Built with permission. Nothing taken.

A public archive of art, contributed by the people who made it — and usable for training artificial intelligence only on terms those people set.

In development · 2026

The other way was to take it.

Most of the systems now writing, painting, and composing were trained on work gathered without asking. No permission was sought. No record was kept. No one was paid, credited, or given the chance to say no.

It did not have to be built that way. It was simply faster.

The Agreement — in plain language

Three things, stated before anyone signs.

What you grant

  • A narrow, revocable licence to use your work for AI training
  • Limited to uses named in the agreement
  • Attribution required, always
  • No sublicensing, no resale

What you keep

  • Your copyright, entire and unchanged
  • Every right of reproduction, sale, display, and adaptation
  • The right to publish anywhere else, at any time
  • The right to withdraw

What you get

  • A timestamped record that your work existed, and when
  • Permanent public attribution
  • Provenance strong enough to be used as evidence
  • Terms you agreed to, in writing

What we will not claim

Withdrawal has limits, and we will name them. If you withdraw your work, it is removed from the archive and from every training run that follows. It cannot be pulled back out of a model already trained on it. No one can do that, and any archive that tells you otherwise is selling something.

We cannot make a picture uncopyable. Anything visible on a screen can be captured. Protection here comes from provenance and law — a record that predates any infringement and terms clear enough to enforce — not from a technical promise that breaks at the screenshot.

Permanence costs money. An archive claiming to outlast its founder owes you an answer about who keeps the lights on. Ours is being written before we ask anyone to sign.

Consent over assignment. Asked, not told.

That principle came from a different project and it turned out to be the only one that mattered. It is easy to state and expensive to keep, which is roughly how you can tell it is real.

Who this is for

Painters, photographers, illustrators, writers, composers, and anyone else whose work has been swept up once already and who would rather decide the second time.

Also for the people building these systems, who have been told that asking permission at scale is impossible. It is not impossible. It is only slower — and this is what it looks like.

Where it stands

Early, and honest about it.

The licence is being drafted with counsel. Nothing is open for submission yet, and no work has been contributed. When the terms are ready, they will be published in full — before the first signature, not after.

If you make things and want to read the agreement when it exists, or if you have an objection that would make it better, that is exactly the correspondence worth having.