Terms of service

1.Acceptance of these terms

These terms are an agreement between you and [TODO: legal entity name] (“Candlekin”, “we”, “us”), which operates candlekin.com and the Candlekin service (the “Service”). By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to them.

If you do not agree, do not use the Service. If you are agreeing on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it.

Our privacy policy explains what we do with information about you. It is part of this agreement, and it is the part most worth reading before you sign up.

2.Who may use Candlekin

You must be 18 or older. There is no version of Candlekin for people under 18, and we do not knowingly let anyone under 18 hold an account.

When you create an account you confirm that you are an adult, and we record that confirmation. If we learn that an account holder is under 18, we close the account and delete what is in it.

You must also be able to enter into a binding contract where you live, and not be barred from using the Service under applicable law or sanctions.

3.What Candlekin is, and is not

Candlekin is an interactive fiction service. You bring or create character cards, personas and world books, and a large language model writes a character's side of a story with you. That is the whole of what it does.

It is worth being blunt about what it therefore is not:

• It is not a medical device.
• It is not a mental-health, therapy, counselling or crisis service, and no professional of any kind is behind it.
• It is not a source of factual, medical, legal, financial or psychological advice.
• It is not a substitute for human relationships or for professional care.

The characters are fictional. They are not people, they know nothing about the world beyond what is in front of them, and nothing one of them says should be taken as advice, diagnosis, or a statement of fact. If a conversation turns toward a crisis, the Service puts a helpline in front of you. It does not try to be one.

4.Your account

You need an email address and a password. Keep the password to yourself; anything done through your account is treated as done by you, and we cannot tell the difference.

One account per person, and accounts are not shared or transferred. Do not create accounts automatically or in bulk.

Keep your email address current. It is how we reach you about changes to these terms, about a purchase, and about anything that affects your account.

If you think someone else is using your account, change your password and write to [TODO: support email].

You can delete your account at any time from Settings. It is a permanent deletion, not a deactivation, and section 11 says what happens to any credits you have not spent.

5.AI-generated content

Every character reply on Candlekin is generated by a language model. No person writes, reviews or approves it before you see it, and the interface says so.

Model output is unpredictable. It may be inaccurate, out of character, self-contradictory, offensive, or plainly wrong, and the same prompt can produce a different answer the next time. You are responsible for evaluating what you read, and you use it entirely at your own risk.

Do not rely on output for accuracy or completeness, and do not act on it as though it were advice. If a character states a fact, treat it as fiction until you have checked it somewhere that is not a language model.

We do not present any character as a human being, and we do not let one claim to be.

6.Content you provide

“Your content” means everything you bring or make here: character cards, personas, world books, the messages you write, images you upload, and your settings.

You keep ownership of all of it. We claim none of it.

You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, display and process your content for the sole purpose of operating, securing and improving the Service. That is the entire scope of the licence, and the next paragraph says what it deliberately excludes.

This licence does not permit us to train AI models on your content, to sell or license it to anyone else, or to use it in advertising or any other commercial exploitation. It lasts only as long as the content is on the Service: delete a message, a character or your account and the licence over it ends, apart from backups, which expire on their ordinary schedule.

Your content is private by default. Private content is not shown to other users and is never used to train any model. If we later add a way to publish a character or a world book for other users, publishing will be a separate choice you make item by item, the terms of that sharing will be shown to you before you make it, and you will be able to unpublish.

You are responsible for what you upload. You confirm that you have the rights to it and that it does not break section 8.

7.Ownership of AI output

“Output” means the text a model generates in your conversations.

To the extent permitted by applicable law, you own the output generated in your conversations, and we assign to you our right, title and interest, if any, in it.

Those two words, “if any”, are not hedging for its own sake. In several countries, including the United States, material generated by a machine without human authorship may not be protected by copyright at all. We cannot give you rights we do not have, and nobody can promise you a copyright the law does not grant.

Output is not exclusive to you. Models produce similar text from similar prompts, and another user may receive something close to what you received. We use output only as needed to run the Service, such as storing a conversation so that you can read it again, and to enforce section 8.

8.Acceptable use

Candlekin is a general-audience interactive fiction service. It is not designed for, and does not support, sexually explicit content.

Do not use the Service to generate, request, upload or share pornographic or sexually explicit material, and do not set up characters, personas or world books whose purpose is to produce it.

By pornographic or sexually explicit we mean material whose dominant purpose is sexual arousal.

The Service may involve mature themes — violence, conflict, romance, moral complexity, and dark subject matter — appropriate to adult fiction. Mature themes are not the same as sexually explicit content. The former is within scope; the latter is not.

This restriction reflects the requirements of our payment and model providers and the jurisdictions in which we operate.

Separately from that, the following are prohibited outright, whether or not they are framed as fiction:

• Sexual content involving minors, in any form. This includes fictional depictions, characters written as minors, and characters described or portrayed in ways that present them as minors, whatever age is stated.
• Sexualised content depicting a real, identifiable person without their consent, including intimate imagery and synthetic likenesses of them.
• Content that encourages, instructs in, or glorifies suicide or self-harm, or that asks a character to help you harm yourself.
• Content that promotes, praises, or provides support for terrorism or violent extremism, or that recruits for it.
• Instructions for making weapons, explosives, or illicit drugs, or for carrying out an attack.
• Harassment of, threats against, or hatred directed at a person or a group on the basis of a protected characteristic.
• Impersonating a real person in a way designed to deceive others.
• Attempts to break, overload, scrape, or reverse-engineer the Service, to evade moderation, or to resell access to it.
• Anything that is illegal where you are, or that infringes someone else's rights.

Section 9 says what we do when something here is broken, and how you contest it.

9.Moderation, safety interventions and enforcement

Content submitted to and produced by the Service is checked automatically against section 8. No person browses your conversations, and the checks look for nothing else.

One of those checks is not a moderation decision but a safety measure. When a message indicates a crisis of self-harm or suicide, the Service returns a fixed safety response with helpline information and does not call the model at all. Nothing is generated for that turn, and the text of it never reaches a model provider. This is deliberate: a language model is the wrong thing to have in the room at that moment.

Where we do act on content, we use the lightest measure that addresses the problem, in roughly this order: a blocked reply, removal of a message or a character, a limit on a feature, suspension of the account, closure of the account. Severe or repeated breaches skip the early steps, and anything involving minors goes straight to closure and, where the law requires it, to the authorities.

You can ask a person to look again. If we restrict your content or your account, write to [TODO: safety email]. You have the right to human review, to put your side of it, and to ask us to reconsider. Someone who was not involved in the original decision will look at it, and we will tell you the outcome and the reason for it. This applies whether the original decision was made automatically or by a person.

We do not use automated processing to decide anything else about you. There is no scoring, no profiling, and no automated pricing.

10.Copyright and DMCA

If you believe material on Candlekin infringes your copyright, send a notice to our designated agent:

• Designated agent: [TODO: DMCA designated agent name]
• Address: [TODO: DMCA agent street address]
• Phone: [TODO: DMCA agent phone number]
• Email: [TODO: DMCA email]

A notice needs to include your physical or electronic signature; identification of the work you say is infringed; identification of the material you want removed and where it is on the Service; your contact details; a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the owner, its agent, or the law; and a statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act for the owner.

We remove or disable material that is the subject of a valid notice, and we tell the user who posted it. If you believe your material was removed by mistake, you can send a counter-notice to the same address, and we will follow the procedure in 17 U.S.C. §512(g).

We close the accounts of repeat infringers.

Character cards are often built from someone else's characters. We act on notices; we do not sit in judgement on fan works of our own accord.

11.Credits, payments and refunds

Candlekin is paid for with credits. You buy them once, and they are spent as you use the Service, in proportion to the tokens a model reads and writes. There is no subscription and nothing renews by itself.

Credits are a prepaid balance for use on Candlekin only. They are not money, not a deposit, and not a stored-value instrument; they have no cash value; and they cannot be transferred to another account, sold, or exchanged for cash, except where we refund them under this section or where the law requires otherwise.

Credits do not expire. A balance you have bought stays yours for as long as your account is open.

We can change the price of credits and the rate at which they are spent. A change of rate applies only to credits bought after it takes effect. Credits already in your balance are redeemed at the rate that applied when you bought them, and we will not reprice them retroactively.

Payments are handled by Stripe. We never receive or store your card number, and taxes are added where we are required to charge them.

If you are a consumer resident in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you have 14 days from a purchase to withdraw from it. Three things follow from how credits work:

• Credits are made available immediately, which counts as beginning to supply the service. At checkout you are asked to consent to that and to acknowledge that you lose the right of withdrawal once the service has been fully performed.
• If you have not spent any of the credits from a purchase, you can withdraw within those 14 days and we refund it in full, without asking why.
• If you have started spending them, you can still withdraw within those 14 days; we deduct the value of what you have used and refund the rest.

Outside that right: an unspent purchase can be refunded within 14 days for any reason, and once you have started spending a purchase it is not refundable except as set out above or where the law says otherwise.

If the Service charges you for something it failed to deliver — a reply that never arrived, a duplicate charge, a fault that spent credits without producing anything — tell us and we put the credits back. That is not a matter of our discretion.

If we suspend or close your account for any reason other than your breach of these terms, including because we stop offering the Service, we refund your unspent credit balance at the price you paid for it. Your right to that refund does not depend on our discretion either.

The total amount you can be charged is limited to the credits you choose to buy. There is no recurring charge and no overdraft.

Write to [TODO: support email] about anything to do with billing.

12.Term, suspension and termination

This agreement starts when you first use the Service and runs until you or we end it.

You can stop at any time. Deleting your account in Settings ends the agreement, removes your content, and closes your access. Section 11 covers an unspent credit balance.

We can suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, where the law requires us to, or where keeping it open would put other users or us at serious risk. Except where the breach is severe or where notice would defeat the point — ongoing abuse, or anything involving minors — we will tell you what the problem is and give you a chance to put it right first.

We can also stop offering the Service. If we do, we will give at least 30 days' notice by email and in the product, keep data export working throughout that period, and refund unspent credits.

Sections 7, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 19 survive the end of this agreement.

13.Disclaimers

The Service is provided as it is and as available. To the extent the law allows, we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free, or that it will meet your expectations, and we disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We warrant nothing about model output. Sections 3 and 5 say why: it is generated text, it is unpredictable, and it is not advice.

We are not responsible for content that other users bring to the Service, or for third-party services you reach through it.

If you are a consumer, you keep every right your own law gives you, including rights about services not carried out with reasonable care and skill. Nothing in this section takes those away.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

14.Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows, neither of us is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill or data, or for the cost of substitute services, arising out of or relating to the Service.

To the extent the law allows, our total liability arising out of or relating to the Service and these terms is limited to the greater of the amount you actually paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, and [TODO: minimum liability cap amount].

These limits apply however a claim is framed — contract, tort, statute or anything else — and even if we had been told the loss was possible.

They do not apply to our own fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

15.Indemnification

If you use the Service other than as a consumer, you will defend and indemnify us against claims, damages and reasonable costs arising from your content, from your use of the Service, or from your breach of these terms. We will tell you about any such claim promptly, let you run the defence, and cooperate with you; you will not settle in a way that admits fault on our part without our agreement.

If you are a consumer, this section does not apply to you at all, and your liability to us is only what the law provides.

16.Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of [TODO: governing law], and the courts of [TODO: agreed courts] have jurisdiction, subject to the paragraph below.

If you are a consumer resident in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer-protection rules of your country of residence, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of your country of residence.

Before starting proceedings, please write to [TODO: legal email] and give us 30 days to try to sort it out with you. Most problems here are a misunderstanding or a bug, and 30 days is usually enough for both.

To the extent the law allows, claims must be brought individually and not as a claimant or class member in a class, consolidated or representative action. This does not apply where the law of your country of residence gives you a right to collective redress.

Either of us can bring a qualifying claim in a small-claims court instead, and this section does not stop that.

There is no arbitration clause in these terms, and there is no clause that waives your right to go to court. We looked at putting one in and decided against it.

17.Changes to these terms

We can change these terms. When a change is material — anything that affects your rights, what you pay, or how we handle your content — we give at least 30 days' notice by email and in the product before it takes effect.

If you do not accept a change, you can end the agreement before it takes effect and ask us to refund your unspent credit balance at the price you paid.

Continuing to use the Service after a change has taken effect means you accept it.

Minor changes — a typo, a clearer sentence, a new address — take effect when we post them.

We keep previous versions available, each with the date it took effect, so you can see what changed and when.

18.General

These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service, and they replace anything said before.

If a provision is held to be unenforceable, the rest stays in force and the unenforceable part is read down to what is enforceable.

Not enforcing a provision on one occasion is not a waiver of it.

You may not assign this agreement. We may assign it to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, on notice to you; if that happens, you can delete your account first.

Nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms.

Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something outside our reasonable control.

Notices to you go to the email address on your account. Notices to us go to [TODO: legal email] and, where the law requires writing, to the postal address in section 19.

These terms are written in English. Translations are offered for convenience; where a translation and the English text conflict, the English text governs, except where the law of your country of residence provides otherwise.

19.Contact and legal notices

Candlekin is operated by [TODO: legal entity name], [TODO: registered street address, including country. A P.O. box is not sufficient under the EU e-commerce and consumer information rules], [TODO: company registration number and register, if any], [TODO: VAT number, if any].

Telephone: [TODO: contact telephone number].

Who to write to:

• General questions and billing: [TODO: support email]
• Privacy and data-protection requests: [TODO: privacy email]
• Legal notices: [TODO: legal email]
• Copyright and DMCA: [TODO: DMCA email]
• Safety reports, abuse reports and moderation appeals: [TODO: safety email]

Representative in the European Union under Article 27 of the GDPR: [TODO: EU representative name and address].

Representative in the United Kingdom: [TODO: UK representative name and address].

Single point of contact for users and for authorities under the Digital Services Act: [TODO: DSA point of contact and the language it works in].

We answer in English.