Arctelia - AI Policy & Pledge

1. What AI Is For Here

Arctelia is a continuity system for a creative practice. The AI in it serves that one purpose: helping you return to fragmented work across time. It reads the material you choose to give it — entries, images, writing, recordings, the record of past sessions — and returns observations, synthesis, and questions in the language of your craft. It speaks differently to a painter, an angler, a gardener, and a novelist, because it reads different artifacts through different lenses. The practitioner remains the author of the work and the authority on it.

2. What the Tools Do

Every AI feature in Arctelia falls into one of five kinds. None of them produces a finished piece of your work.

Reflect

Guidance for each motion of a session, a portrait of your practice drawn from your own record, and a suggested next focus. These are observations from one practitioner to another, not instructions and not task lists.

Summarise your own material

Project, phase, thread, writing, and scribble-board summaries so that a long record can be re-entered quickly. A summary reads your material and never writes into it.

Read and label

Transcribing a voice note, reading handwriting off a board, describing a session capture so it can be found again, reading an image you attach, and screening uploaded images for safety. These produce labels and transcripts of what you made, not new work.

Structure what you give it

Splitting a pasted recipe into ingredients and steps, pulling citations out of reference material by copying rather than composing, and pre-filling a craft log only with values your notes or captures state outright. Each pre-filled value carries its provenance, so you stay the author of record.

Suggest

Three tools offer words. We count them as guidance, because each one stops short of your work and waits for you:

• The grammar check in the writing surface flags typos and slips and offers a fix for each. Its instructions call it a type editor, not a writer: it never rewrites your voice or restructures a sentence, and nothing changes until you accept a fix yourself.
• Tying steps on the fly vise describe how to tie the fly you composed on the board, from the materials you placed. It may not invent a material with no basis on the board, and any material it proposes is added only when you tap to add it.
• Possible directions in Inspiration are framed as possibilities for a next project, alongside an invitation to write your own. One becomes a card on your board only if you pin it.

3. Where the Line Is

The line is not a preference; it is written into the instructions every model receives. Among the standing rules:

• “Do not create new entries or artifacts.”
• “Do not rewrite or summarize logs” in guidance, and “never reuse the user's exact wording.”
• “Ground your response only in the artifacts and observable work that are actually present.”
• “You are a type editor, not a writer.”
• “Do not invent materials with no basis on the board.”
• Log values are filled “never inferred, never guessed,” and only with provenance.
• “Never invent a reference, quotation, or citation.”

The rule that follows from all of these: nothing the AI wrote enters your work unless you put it there.

4. What AI Never Does

• It does not generate images, music, video, or code. There is no image or sound generation anywhere in Arctelia.
• It does not write your manuscript, draw on your boards, or compose entries in your name.
• It does not create entries or artifacts on its own.
• It does not act in the background, apart from the two safety and housekeeping checks described in the Privacy Policy: screening uploaded images and describing session captures.
• It does not replace your judgment, expertise, or responsibility.
• It does not provide medical, legal, financial, or safety-critical advice.

5. Assistants You Connect

You can connect an AI assistant of your own, such as Claude, to your account through our connector. When you do, that assistant may read your record and, if you allow it, record entries and threads on your behalf. The connector tells it plainly that it is the scribe, not the author: it must ask you for your words rather than fabricate them, and every entry it records is tagged as agent-authored so you can always tell which is which. It cannot delete entries, change billing, or change account settings. You can disconnect it at any time from your profile.

6. When AI Processing Happens

Almost all AI processing is triggered by you: submitting a session log, requesting guidance, asking for a summary, or using another AI-labelled feature. Two checks run on their own, because they cannot wait for a button: every uploaded image is screened for safety, and session captures are described so they can be tagged and searched in your own library. Both are described in full in the Privacy Policy. Nothing else runs on your content in the background.

7. What Gets Sent

7.1 Entry, Project, and Session Context

When you request guidance, Arctelia may send the current entry and the surrounding context needed to make that entry legible. Depending on the feature, this can include:

• The current entry text, notes, intent, and craft context
• Project summary, phase context, and recent entries from the same project
• Structured session data such as conditions, craft log fields, and related metadata

7.2 Artifacts

• Images may be sent for visual analysis, handwriting reading, or safety screening through time-limited signed links
• Audio may be sent for transcription or analysis
• Writing and text artifacts may be sent for summary or guidance

7.3 Location Context

If the relevant entry or capture includes place context, we may send a place name or a city-level description to improve the response. Precise coordinates are not sent to AI providers, and Arctelia does no background location tracking.

8. Providers

Arctelia uses several providers because different models are better at different tasks. Which one is used depends on the feature you invoke and the artifact type involved.

9. Model Training and Retention

We do not send your content to AI providers for the purpose of training their models, and we do not train models of our own on your content. We use these providers under API terms that prohibit training on inputs, and we choose providers whose terms include that protection. We cannot independently audit every internal practice of a third party, which is why the pledge above is ours to keep and theirs to honour by contract.

Guidance text generated for your sessions is stored alongside the associated entry so you can revisit it later. When the related entry or account is deleted, that stored guidance is deleted with it, subject to the backup windows described in the Privacy Policy.

10. Limitations and Risk

AI outputs can be incomplete, wrong, overly confident, or poorly matched to the nuance of your practice. Use the guidance as reflection, not as authority. If a response touches health, law, safety, finances, or another high-stakes domain, do not treat it as professional advice.

11. Relationship to Other Policies

This AI Policy supplements, and does not replace, the Terms and Conditions and the Privacy Policy. If there is a conflict about general account rules, billing, or liability, the Terms and Conditions govern. If there is a conflict about retention or your privacy rights, the Privacy Policy governs.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy as the AI features evolve. When we do, we will update the date at the top of this document and notify registered users by email before changes take effect. We will not move the line in section 3 toward generating your work without saying so plainly first.

13. Contact

If you have questions about AI in Arctelia or how your data is processed when you use it, contact us at:

hello@arctelia.app