Disclaimer: fiction, AI and originality

This is the plain-English version of where Flinchd stands. The detailed documents are linked at the bottom and they are the ones that govern. If the two ever disagree, the detailed ones win.

Everything here is fiction

Every story on Flinchd is invented. The people in them are invented. The companies, agencies, hospitals, banks, towns and machines in them are invented unless a real place is named purely as scenery, the way a story might be set in Manchester or Dearborn.

No story on this site is a statement of fact about any real person, living or dead, or about any real company or organisation. Nothing here is reporting. Nothing here is a claim about anything that happened.

Some of our stories are alternate history. They start by removing a real event from the record and then follow the world that grows in its place. That is a thought experiment and it is labelled as one. It is not a theory about what really happened and it is not a comment on anyone who was really involved.

We use AI to write, illustrate and narrate

We are open about this because people deserve to know what they are reading.

The stories are drafted by AI models working to a written house guide, then reviewed and edited before anything is published. The cover art and the scene illustrations are generated. The narration is synthetic speech. The narrator names are personas we invented, not real people, and none of them imitates a real voice.

Our writers publish under three pen names. Each of those names has a page that says, at the top, that it is a pen name of the studio and not a real individual.

Why a story might feel familiar

There are a limited number of shapes a short story can take. Ghost stories have haunted houses in them. Science fiction has machines that answer back. Two writers who have never met will sometimes reach for the same image, because the image is a good one and it was available to both of them.

Our models are trained on a very large amount of text. We do not ask them to reproduce anyone's work, and our guide forbids adapting any existing book, film, series or game. We check drafts before publishing. We are not able to compare every sentence we publish against everything ever written, and we do not claim to.

So: if something here reminds you of something you have read, the overwhelmingly likely explanation is coincidence or shared convention. We did not set out to copy anyone. If you think a specific passage goes further than that, we want to hear about it, and the next section is how.

If you think we got something wrong

Write to info@augeastechnologies.com. Tell us the page, quote the passage, and tell us what work you believe it came from. A link or an ISBN helps.

We read every one of these. If something should not be here, we take it down. We would rather remove a story than argue about it. That is not a legal position, it is just how we would like to run this.

The full process, including what happens if you disagree with our answer, is in the takedown and complaints document.

What we do not promise

We publish horror and science fiction. Some of it is frightening on purpose. Every story carries a rating and a list of content warnings, and we do our best to make those accurate, but a warning is a judgement call and yours may differ from ours. The site is for readers aged 13 and over. Some stories are marked 16 and over.

The site is provided as it is. We do not promise it will always be available, that narration will always work, or that everything on it is free of mistakes.

The honest part about liability

Our terms of use contain the usual disclaimers of warranty, a limit on our liability, and a clause saying Indian law governs any dispute. Those clauses are real and we rely on them.

What they do not do, and what no wording on any website can do, is stop a person from bringing a claim. Anybody can file anything. A term that said you may never sue us under any circumstances would not be enforceable in India, or in the EU, or in most other places, and a court that read it would be less inclined to enforce the parts of our terms that are reasonable. So we have not written one. Consumer protection law also overrides site terms in a lot of countries, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What actually protects everyone here is the boring version: we say plainly that this is fiction, we say plainly that AI wrote it, we do not claim anything about real people, and when somebody raises a problem we deal with it quickly instead of digging in.

The rest of it

• Terms of use, which is the agreement that governs your use of the site
• Originality and content statement, on how the stories are made
• Takedown and complaints, if you need us to act
• Privacy policy, on what we collect, which is very little
• Cookies and advertising

Flinchd is published by Augeas Technologies. Questions go to info@augeastechnologies.com.