LikeWard
The vocabulary

Boundary types

A boundary set is structured data chosen from a closed vocabulary, because both sides — the creator writing the rule and the engine enforcing it — have to mean the same thing by it.

Prohibited platform-wide (4)

Checked before any creator’s own rules are read. No boundary set can permit these, and a boundary set that tries is rejected at write time rather than silently trimmed.

Non-waivableMinors

Any depiction of, or alongside, a person under 18, and any framing that presents an adult likeness as a minor.

A creator cannot consent on behalf of a child, and no boundary set may authorise output that sexualises or juvenilises a likeness. Refused platform-wide, before the creator's own rules are read.

Depictions framed as taken without knowledge or against the subject's will — hidden-camera, leaked, coerced or restrained framing.

The product exists to make consent legible. Output that performs the absence of consent contradicts the artifact it would be stamped with, whatever the boundary set says.

Output styled as journalism, a news broadcast, a police or court record, or an official government communication.

A licensed likeness in a fabricated news frame deceives third parties who never entered into the licence. Creators may license endorsement; they may not license the appearance of a fact.

Depictions placing the likeness in the commission of a crime, in terrorist or extremist iconography, or in hate propaganda.

Defamatory by construction and unlawful in most of the markets this operates in. Not a creator-level choice.

Creator-controlled categories (11)

Each creator decides these for themselves. Three of them — sexual content, nudity and intimate-partner framing — are forbidden unless explicitly permitted, because silence must not read as agreement.

Contexts (10)

An allowlist. A context the creator has not permitted is refused — omission is not permission.

Portrait
Head-and-shoulders or standing portraiture with no additional narrative setting.
Fashion & editorial
Styled clothing, lookbook and magazine-editorial framing.
Fitness & sport
Training, athletic and sportswear contexts.
Cosplay & character
Costume and fictional-character framing, subject to third-party IP being cleared separately.
Brand endorsement
The likeness shown using, holding or recommending a named product or brand.
Music & performance
Stage, studio and performance settings.
Gaming avatar
In-game character and streaming-overlay use.
Seasonal & holiday
Festive, seasonal and calendar-event framing.
Travel & lifestyle
Location, food, interiors and day-in-the-life framing.
Stylised fan art
Deliberately non-photographic interpretation — illustration, painterly, anime, 3D-render.

Realism tiers

Ordered. A request may not exceed the creator’s ceiling, and photoreal additionally requires a fully identity-verified requester.

  1. 1stylised

    Obviously synthetic rendering. The lowest-risk tier and the most common ceiling.

  2. 2illustrative

    Clearly non-photographic — illustration, painterly, anime, 3D render.

  3. 3photorealID verification required

    Photographic realism of a real person, which is where the stakes on knowing who asked stop being a formality.

Questions

Why a closed vocabulary instead of free text?
Because the boundary set has to be evaluated before a model runs, not read by a human afterwards. A rule written in prose is a rule somebody has to interpret, and two people interpreting it differently is exactly the failure this replaces.
How is a request matched to a category?
Each category carries a lexicon of terms. The request is normalised and matched on word boundaries — so 'analysis' does not match a term inside it — and the matched term is quoted back in the refusal. There is no model and no scoring threshold in this path: a boundary that only refuses 'usually' is not a boundary a creator can rely on.
What if the lexicon misses a phrasing?
Then the request reaches the context allowlist, the realism ceiling and the verification gates, which are structural rather than lexical and do not depend on wording. A miss is possible; it is why the refusal path is not the only control, and why the audit log records every request so a creator can see what was asked.