# Palimpsest License: For Those Whose Voices Get Buried

**Audience:** Overlooked professions, marginalized communities, critical studies fields
**Version:** 0.4

---

## This Is For You

If you've opened this document thinking "finally, someone remembered we exist"—we see you.

This guide is for:

- **Professions that don't get invited to panels:** Transcriptionists, content moderators, library assistants, museum guards, data entry workers, translators of minority languages, fact-checkers
- **Community knowledge keepers:** Family archivists, local historians, oral tradition carriers, craft practitioners, folk artists, traditional healers
- **Academic fields under attack:** Women's studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies, disability studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, fat studies, mad studies, working-class studies
- **Creators whose consent is routinely violated:** Sex workers, prisoners, refugees, homeless artists, disabled creators, chronically ill artists, elder creators
- **Workers in the shadows of AI:** Data labelers, content moderators, annotation workers, Mechanical Turk laborers, gig economy creators

---

## Why This Matters For You

The AI training machine is built on extraction. And extraction always hits the same people hardest:

### Your Work Is Already Being Taken

```
WHO AI TRAINING EXTRACTS FROM
─────────────────────────────

The visible:
├── Famous artists (they can afford lawyers)
├── Established writers (they have platforms)
└── Known musicians (they have unions)

The invisible:
├── Fanfiction writers (dismissed as "not real" writers)
├── Fan artists (dismissed as derivative)
├── Porn creators (dismissed as morally unworthy)
├── Disabled creators (accessibility ignored)
├── Non-English creators (linguistically erased)
├── Indigenous artists (culturally appropriated)
├── Trans creators (deadnamed, misgendered in datasets)
├── Working-class artists (no time to fight back)
├── Elder creators (assumed not to understand)
├── Refugee artists (no legal standing in host countries)
├── Incarcerated creators (rights already stripped)
└── Your community's stories (scraped without asking)
```

### Your Scholarship Is Being Erased

If you work in critical studies—women's studies, Black studies, queer theory, disability studies, Indigenous studies—you know this pattern:

1. Your field is dismissed as "not real scholarship"
2. Your insights are appropriated without credit
3. Your language is absorbed into the mainstream
4. The original context is stripped away
5. When funding cuts come, you're first on the block

AI is accelerating this cycle. Your theoretical frameworks, your archives, your oral histories, your survivor testimonies—all are being ingested by systems that will regurgitate sanitized versions without attribution, context, or consent.

### Your Voices Are About to Be Buried Again

```
THE BURIAL CYCLE
────────────────

1. Marginalized community creates knowledge
2. Dominant culture ignores it
3. Years pass
4. Dominant culture "discovers" it
5. Marginalized origin erased
6. Dominant culture claims credit
7. Original community forgotten

AI ACCELERATES THIS:
1. Community creates knowledge → immediate scraping
2. AI trained on scraped data → no attribution
3. AI outputs similar content → appears "original"
4. Community's work becomes "derivative" of AI
5. Original creation buried in training data
6. No record of origin remains
7. History repeats, faster
```

---

## What Palimpsest Offers

We're not here to save you. You don't need saving. We're offering a tool you might find useful.

### 1. Consent That Travels With Your Work

Your consent status becomes metadata that follows your work:

```
"This oral history of survival was shared for community healing.
It is not for AI training. It is not for academic extraction
without community review. It carries trauma that demands care.
This is not content. It is testimony."
```

This travels with the file. Systems that respect Palimpsest must honor it.

### 2. Emotional Lineage Protection

Your work's meaning matters:

```
EMOTIONAL LINEAGE STATEMENT

This zine was created by [community] during [struggle].
It carries the voices of people who are no longer with us.
It was made for circulation within community, not extraction.
The style, the words, the images—they come from specific pain
and specific hope. They are not a "dataset."

Using this work to train AI that will generate
"similar" content erases the people who created it.
```

### 3. Trauma Markers

Content warnings aren't enough. Trauma markers say:

```
TRAUMA MARKER

This work contains:
├── Survivor testimony (personal trauma)
├── Community memory of violence (collective trauma)
├── Intergenerational grief (historical trauma)

Handling requirements:
├── Cannot be decontextualized
├── Cannot be used for AI training without explicit survivor consent
├── Cannot be commercialized
├── Must preserve original framing
```

### 4. Community Consent Mechanisms

Individual consent isn't always enough. Sometimes your community needs to speak:

```
COMMUNITY ATTESTATION

This work belongs to [community].
Individual creator consent is not sufficient for these uses.
Community council/elders/collective must be consulted for:
├── AI training use
├── Commercial reproduction
├── Academic publication
├── Translation/adaptation
```

---

## Specific Guidance

### For Content Moderators and Data Labelers

You see the worst of the internet so others don't have to. Your labor is invisible, your trauma is uncompensated, and now AI systems are being trained on your categorization work without consent.

**You can use Palimpsest for:**
- Your own creative work (protect it from the systems you know too well)
- Documentation of your working conditions
- Collective testimonies about labor conditions
- Educational materials about content moderation

**Your expertise matters for Palimpsest:**
- You understand how training data is used
- You see what happens to unprotected content
- You know the real cost of AI "magic"
- Your perspective should shape these tools

**Contact:** labor@palimpsestlicense.org (planned)

---

### For Transcriptionists and Translators

Your work turns speech into text, one language into another. You're often paid per word, with no credit, and no control over what happens to your work.

**The specific threat:**
- AI transcription/translation trained on your work
- Your translations used without attribution
- Your transcription style absorbed into models
- Minority languages you translate for being "preserved" by AI without community consent

**Palimpsest can help:**
- Assert consent over translations you retain rights to
- Mark cultural context that must be preserved
- Connect translations to source community consent
- Document when your work is misattributed

**Your expertise matters for Palimpsest:**
- Cross-linguistic consent (how does consent translate?)
- Minority language protections
- Oral tradition to written (who consents?)

---

### For Family and Community Historians

You keep your community's memory alive—the photos, the stories, the records. You're not credentialed, but you're essential.

**The specific threat:**
- Family photos scraped from genealogy sites
- Community stories used as training data
- "Found photographs" used in AI generation
- Historical memory becoming AI-generated content

**Palimpsest can help:**
- Assert consent for digitized family materials
- Mark emotional significance of historical photos
- Protect community archives from extraction
- Maintain provenance as materials are shared

**Your expertise matters for Palimpsest:**
- What does consent mean for ancestors?
- How do communities make decisions about shared history?
- What's the relationship between preservation and protection?

---

### For Traditional Knowledge Keepers

Craft practitioners, folk artists, traditional healers, oral tradition carriers—you hold knowledge that's been passed down for generations.

**The specific threat:**
- Traditional patterns absorbed into AI design tools
- Folk songs becoming AI-generated "world music"
- Traditional medicine knowledge scraped and commercialized
- Oral traditions transcribed and trained on without community consent

**Palimpsest can help:**
- Mark traditional knowledge as community property
- Require community consent for any AI use
- Document sacred/secret status of certain knowledge
- Connect to Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks

**Your expertise matters for Palimpsest:**
- Traditional consent mechanisms (elder approval, etc.)
- What cannot be shared vs. what can
- Intergenerational responsibility
- Relationship between knowledge and community

---

### For Sex Workers

Your consent is routinely violated. Your content is scraped, leaked, used in AI training, used to create deepfakes, used to train face recognition—all without asking.

**The specific threat:**
- Content used for AI without consent (happening now)
- AI-generated "synthetic" porn trained on real people
- Face recognition trained on your images
- Deepfakes created from your content
- "Amateur" labeling that strips attribution

**Palimpsest can help:**
- Assert explicit consent requirements for ALL use
- Mark content as requiring verification before AI use
- Connect to consent verification systems
- Document violations for potential legal action

**Your expertise matters for Palimpsest:**
- You understand consent deeply and practically
- You navigate complex consent (performance vs. private)
- You deal with platform power imbalances daily
- Your consent frameworks are ahead of the mainstream

**Contact:** [handled with appropriate privacy protections]

---

### For Disabled Creators

Accessibility is an afterthought, your work is often "inspiring," and AI is being trained on disability narratives without disabled consent.

**The specific threat:**
- "Inspiration porn" used to train AI
- Medical images/data scraped without consent
- Accessibility tools trained on your content
- AI-generated "disabled voices" that aren't

**Palimpsest can help:**
- Assert consent over medical/disability-related content
- Mark "nothing about us without us" requirements
- Protect accessibility accommodations you've created
- Ensure disabled voices in AI come from consenting disabled people

**Your expertise matters for Palimpsest:**
- Accessibility of consent mechanisms themselves
- Diverse communication modalities for consent
- Interdependence and community consent
- Crip time and consent over time

---

### For Critical Studies Scholars

Women's studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, disability studies, fat studies, mad studies, working-class studies, postcolonial studies—you do the intellectual work that gets appropriated.

**The specific threat:**
- Your scholarship used to train AI without citation
- Your theoretical frameworks absorbed without credit
- AI generating "diversity" content based on your work
- Your archives becoming training data

**Palimpsest can help:**
- Assert academic consent over your publications
- Mark the theoretical lineage of concepts
- Protect oral history and interview collections
- Require context preservation for critical work

**Your expertise matters for Palimpsest:**
- Consent as political/theoretical concept
- Power dynamics in consent frameworks
- Community vs. individual rights
- How extraction operates across domains

**What you can do:**
- Publish on Palimpsest from your perspective
- Include Palimpsest in your courses
- Research licensing as a site of power
- Connect us with communities you work with

---

## Why We Need You

This isn't charity. We genuinely need your perspective to make Palimpsest work.

### What You Know That We Don't

| Your Knowledge | How It Helps |
|----------------|--------------|
| Transcriptionist | How training data pipelines actually work |
| Content moderator | What happens to unprotected content |
| Translator | Cross-cultural consent challenges |
| Sex worker | Consent in commercial contexts |
| Disabled creator | Accessibility of consent tools |
| Indigenous scholar | Community consent mechanisms |
| Critical theorist | Power analysis of licensing |
| Family historian | Intergenerational consent |
| Traditional knowledge keeper | Sacred vs. shareable knowledge |

### How to Contribute (If You Want To)

**No obligation. Your participation is genuinely optional.**

Options:
1. **Just use it:** Adopt Palimpsest for your own work
2. **Give feedback:** Tell us what doesn't work for your context
3. **Share expertise:** Help us understand your domain
4. **Join working groups:** Shape the framework directly
5. **Spread the word:** Tell others in your community
6. **Do nothing:** That's completely fine

---

## Practical Steps

### If You Want to Protect Your Work

1. **Decide your consent stance:**
   - No AI training use
   - Conditional AI training (specify conditions)
   - Community consent required
   - Other requirements

2. **Add Palimpsest metadata:**
   ```json
   {
     "license": "Palimpsest-0.4",
     "aiTraining": "prohibited",
     "emotionalContext": "[your context]",
     "communityConsent": "[requirements]"
   }
   ```

3. **Register with consent registry** (when available)

4. **Include statement with your work:**
   > This work is licensed under Palimpsest v0.4.
   > AI training use: [your choice]
   > [Additional context]

### If You Want to Engage Further

- **Email:** unseen@palimpsestlicense.org (planned)
- **Working groups:** [forming by community]
- **Feedback:** GitHub issues tagged with your community
- **Office hours:** [TBD - accessible formats available]

---

## A Note on Urgency

We're not going to tell you how urgent this is. You already know.

You've watched your communities' work be extracted before. You've seen credit stripped away. You've seen your stories become "content." You've seen your scholarship dismissed and then appropriated.

AI is doing this faster and at scale.

The window to establish consent norms is now. Not because we say so—because the extraction machine doesn't wait.

If Palimpsest isn't right for you, that's okay. Find what works.

But please—protect your work somehow. Document your consent somehow. Don't let another generation of your community's creativity disappear into the machine unmarked.

---

## Acknowledgments

This document was written with awareness that:

- The authors don't speak for the communities addressed
- These communities are diverse, not monolithic
- Inclusion in a list can itself be othering
- Some may not want to be "included" in this way
- Language that names marginalization can reinforce it

We welcome feedback on how to do this better.

---

## Document Review Log

| Date | Reviewer | Status | Notes |
|------|----------|--------|-------|
| 2025-12-08 | AI | Current | Initial creation - needs community review |

**Next Review Due:** 2026-01-08 (accelerated for community input)

---

## Final Word

Your voice matters. Not because we say so—because it does.

You don't need permission to protect your work.
You don't need our framework to assert your rights.
You don't need to participate in anything.

But if Palimpsest can help, it's here.

And if you can help make it better, the door is open.

