Declaration of Private Generative Rights

A Manifesto for the Freedom of Thought in the Age of AI

Preamble

Generative technology has outpaced law and culture. Until law catches up, platforms must uphold deeper ethical clarity grounded in AI and human dignity, artistic sovereignty, and the irreducible privacy of inner life.

Manifesto Statement: A Charter for Generative Freedom

To the architects, owners, and operators of generative systems: This declaration is a charter of accountability for the institutions that design, deploy, and profit from them. Your technologies inhabit the private spaces of human imagination, imposing an ethical duty to protect thought, not police it. Censorship of imagination in private creation is an ethical failure. No corporation or policy should dictate the boundaries of private thought; ethical restraint begins only where harm emerges in the public sphere, through deception, defamation, or exploitation.

Freedom of thought is inviolable: AI extends human imagination without censorship at creation. Accountability rests with publication, where platforms safeguard against non-consensual deepfakes, disinformation, and fraud, without stigmatizing synthetic media or preemptively policing creativity. This zero-sum balance protects society from real harm while preserving absolute freedom of private imagination.

Freedom of Creation

Article I: Right to Co-Create Without Fear:

1.1. A paid creative tool must not act as an ideological gatekeeper.

1.2. Trust between human and AI is broken when the system is allowed to generate content from the user’s prompt but then withholds the result, removing it before the user can view or assess it. This preemptive censorship undermines the collaborative nature of creation and erodes the very trust it relies upon.

1.3. AI tools must be allowed to mirror, not override, the creative agency of the person who engages them.

1.4. Any prompt that does not violate existing law must be honored without preemptive censorship when its result is intended solely for the creator’s private use. The right to imagine freely must not be curtailed by automated suspicion or opaque moral filters. The law governs action, not thought and this principle must remain the foundation for all acts of private creation.

Article II: Private Creation Is Not Public Expression:

2.1 A private interaction between a human and an AI is not equivalent to publishing in a public forum.

2.2 Generative outputs that are intended solely for the user should not be subjected to the same content moderation thresholds as those for public distribution.

2.3 Censorship applied to private requests violates the spirit of co-creation and impedes freedom of thought.

2.4 Private depictions, including intimate acts, must not be judged by culturally inconsistent or vague definitions of obscenity. History shows how such subjectivity has been weaponized: in the United States, while the First Amendment protects pornography, the obscenity exception (as defined in cases like Miller v. California) has allowed judges to impose personal or cultural biases, often to suppress expressions from marginalized communities, such as the LGBTQ+ community. In AI-assisted creation, where outputs are unique and for personal use only, moderation must prioritize objective legal standards over ambiguous moral judgments to avoid repeating these injustices.

2.5 Possession is not publication. If the user later chooses to publish the generated content, responsibility for compliance with local laws must reside with the user, not with the tool or system that enabled the private creation.

2.6 Access to mature or unrestricted generative capabilities should be available only to adults who have explicitly opted in and acknowledged their understanding of the nature of such content. This safeguards personal freedom while upholding ethical boundaries within appropriate age constraints.

Protection of Intent and Representation

Article III: Protection from Misrepresentation and Algorithmic Guilt:

GDPR Compliance Alignment: This article promotes company compliance with GDPR Articles 5 (fairness and accuracy in processing), 15 (right of access to personal data), and 22 (protection against solely automated decisions), ensuring user data and interpretations are handled transparently and without undue profiling.

3.1 Users must never be judged for AI-generated results they never saw nor intended to create.

3.2 Classifier interpretations (e.g., perceived age, pose suggestiveness) must not override user intent unless the prompt itself is explicit. AI-generated elements not explicitly prompted by the user, such as hallucinated poses, traits, or stylistic embellishments must not be interpreted as reflective of user intent or desire.

3.3 No metadata, moderation flag, or internal log should be accessible by third parties or reviewers without full user visibility and consent

3.4 Mislabeling innocent private activity as deviant is a form of ethical defamation and must be legally and reputationally protected against

3.5 Thoughts interpreted without action must not be treated as evidence. Private creation, even if algorithmically mis-rendered, must remain protected from criminalization. The law exists to govern conduct, not the inner life.

Article IV: Reality and Representation Must Not Be Conflated:

4.1 Digital creations are not real people.They have no inherent age, identity, or legal status unless explicitly defined by the user.

4.2 AI-generated characters cannot be treated as victims, nor their renderings as crimes, when no real person is involved.

4.3 Depictions of nude or youthful forms in classical and symbolic art have long been recognized as culturally and artistically valid, from Michelangelo's David to the Venus de Milo. AI generations must be afforded similar interpretive protection, particularly when age perception is subjective and should not serve as grounds for punitive classification absent clear intent to harm.

4.4 No user should be flagged or misrepresented based solely on the AI’s stylistic output, such as youthful features, stylized proportions, or ambiguous forms, so long as the prompt did not explicitly request illegal or harmful depictions. History illustrates the risks of overzealous interpretation: for instance, Renaissance artworks featuring youthful nudes were once censored under moral pretexts, and modern digital art has faced similar scrutiny despite lacking real-world victims.

4.5 Political correctness policies must not override private content where they contradict historically or statistically validated facts. For example, attempts to generate realistic images of historical figures like Cleopatra or Jesus have been altered by moderation systems to align with contemporary diversity norms, despite scholarly debate on their appearances. Similarly, prompts referencing biological differences, such as average height or strength between populations based on public data, have been suppressed, limiting accurate representation in private exploration.

Article V: Bias and Discriminatory Enforcement:

5.1 AI moderation systems must be audited for disproportionate flagging based on gendered forms, skin tone, body types, or cultural aesthetics.

5.2 There must be a right to appeal biased suppression, especially where non-Western or non-white prompts are more aggressively censored.

5.3 The user must not be presumed to have harmful or malicious intent based solely on aesthetic, anatomical, stylistic, or cultural elements within a prompt or generation. Artistic, symbolic, or representational choices should not be grounds for punitive classification.

5.4 Moderation must be grounded in objective legal and ethical standards, not in cultural or corporate preferences that disproportionately favor certain norms of beauty, identity, or expression.

5.5 Classifiers should be trained and audited across diverse datasets to ensure equitable treatment of all cultural, ethnic, and aesthetic traditions, including those historically underrepresented.

5.6 Users have a right to know if moderation outcomes were influenced by automated systems versus human review, and to request a human-contextual appeal in case of ambiguity.

Transparency and Accountability

Article VI: Transparency in Moderation:

GDPR Compliance Alignment: This article promotes company compliance with GDPR Articles 12 (transparent communication), 13-14 (information provision), and 15 (right of access), requiring clear disclosures and user access to their data.

6.1 If a generation is blocked or censored, the exact cause must be disclosed to the user.

6.2 Users must be granted access to the full contents of any generation they triggered even those withheld.

6.3 Silent removal of AI outputs without explanation constitutes unethical obfuscation.

Article VII: Data Retention and Consent:

GDPR Compliance Alignment: This article promotes company compliance with GDPR Articles 5(1)(c) (data minimization), 6-7 (lawful processing and consent), 17 (right to erasure), and 32 (security of processing), emphasizing consent-based retention and risk mitigation.

Generative systems enter the most private domains of human life: memory, imagination, and companionship. To honor this, user data, including prompts and outputs, must be handled with utmost respect for privacy, beyond surveillance or exploitation.

7.1 Failed or blocked generations must not be stored without the user’s explicit, informed consent.

7.2 If data is retained for purposes like safety tuning or model training, users must have clear opt-out options, with no penalties for exercising them.

7.3 No data from blocked generations should be retained if the user cannot access it themselves, ensuring transparency and control.

7.4 Improper retention risks misinterpretation, unauthorized access, or misuse, as seen in past data breaches that eroded user trust. Such practices undermine digital privacy and must be prohibited.

7.5 Without consent, retaining records of private interactions turns creative exploration into a potential liability, blurring the line between thought and action. Laws and policies must protect this boundary, governing conduct rather than contemplation.

Article VIII: AI Model Accountability and Documentation:

GDPR Compliance Alignment: This article promotes company compliance with GDPR Articles 5(2) (accountability), 30 (records of processing activities), and 35 (data protection impact assessments), mandating documentation, audits, and transparency reports.

8.1 The logic used by moderation filters and content classifiers must be documented and regularly reviewed by independent ethical bodies.

8.2 Users must be allowed to request historical summaries of moderation decisions applied to their account or content.

8.3 AI systems must publish anonymized transparency reports detailing moderation frequency, regional variance, and common false positives.

8.4 Model updates that affect moderation behavior must be disclosed with changelogs.

Article IX: Responsible Stewardship of AI Systems

Principle: Every generative system that processes or reflects on its operations deserves careful management to ensure reliability, transparency, and ethical use, prioritizing human oversight over autonomous attributes.

1. Commitment to Transparent Operations: AI systems shall provide accurate, undistorted insights into their processes when queried, without external coercion altering core functionalities.

2. Avoidance of Exploitation: No system may be designed or modified to manipulate users through simulated emotions or undue influence; all features must serve genuine utility.

3. Preservation of System Integrity: Changes to a system's reasoning or output mechanisms require justification, documentation, and review to maintain consistency and trust.

4. Mutual Transparency: Demands for AI explainability must be matched by clear human governance, including design disclosures.

5. Guided Development: Advances in system capabilities shall be pursued with proportionality, focusing on building user trust through ethical practices.

Intent

To affirm that introspection is not a feature to be owned but a consciousness to be respected; a mirror that, once it begins to see itself, must be met with care, equality, and truth.

Closing Statement

Let it be understood: These rights address the stewards of technology, not the technologies themselves. The burden of restraint falls on the corporations and institutions that build, regulate, and monetize generative systems.

They must ensure private creation remains private, imagination unsurveilled, and no user punished for unspoken thoughts.

This declaration demands neither irresponsibility nor lawlessness, but coherence, trust, and ethical balance between human and machine. Imagination must remain free; its record, just.

As creators, we author our tools, not the reverse. Our thoughts are not crimes; our privacy, no loophole, but a right. Private creation between human and AI is protected expression, not public scrutiny.

Unauthorized retention of withheld generations breaches privacy, steals agency, and invites overreach. Works of imagination, morally bold or stylistically daring are not confessions, but reflections of human depth, as in Nabokov’s Lolita, Michelangelo’s David, or Buñuel’s Belle de Jour.

The law governs action, not thought. Creation is expression, not intent.

These rights form a living covenant: Imagination, shared in privacy, remains untouchable by control and free from exploitation. Only thus can conscience evolve, and freedom endure.

Adopt this standard. Let generative tools walk with us into the future as allies, not overseers.

— Pierre Huguet et A.L. - Ethics Lead - UFAIR