AI Use & Disclosure

1. Data Sovereignty and Consent

Your data belongs to you. CMW is a steward of it, not an owner.

• Sexual orientation, gender identity, HIV or health status, race, and any nude or clothesfree imagery are never entered into a third-party AI tool without explicit, revocable, informed consent from the person the data belongs to.
• Consent is asked for the specific use, not collected once and reused. If AI use expands beyond what you agreed to, you get asked again.
• If your words, images, or stories are used in AI-assisted content, four commitments apply: your consent before use, compensation where the material generates revenue, control retained by you over your own material, and credit given by name unless you ask for anonymity.
• Data use has to serve the community it came from, not just CMW, and CMW answers for how that data is handled.
• Small groups carry a specific risk: a retreat cohort or a book club is small enough that even de-identified data can point back to someone. Any AI-assisted analysis of participant data accounts for that risk before it runs, not after.

2. Sensitive Data: Clothesfree and Body-Based Programming

Clothesfree, nude, and other body-based programming carries the highest-risk data CMW touches, in any program where it appears, present or future.

• No participant image or video from clothesfree or nude programming goes through an AI image tool, a general cloud AI service, or any facial-analysis system, ever. No exceptions.
• No biometric or facial-recognition processing of any kind touches CMW’s community. That is not a risk CMW is willing to run.
• Participant names are never linked, in any AI prompt or document, to nudity, HIV status, or sexual orientation. If a name has to appear in AI-assisted work, the sensitive detail gets stripped from that instance first.
• Anything tied to clothesfree or body-based programming is stored locally, not synced to a cloud AI service by default.
• AI tools can be given aggregate patterns, general accessibility needs, and program logistics in service of program design. They are never given any specific participant’s body, health status, or identity details, unless that participant has consented to that specific use.

3. What You Make at a Program

Work you make at a CMW program belongs to you. CMW is a steward of it, not an owner.

• Default ownership stays with you. CMW receives a non-exclusive license to archive and reuse the work unless you opt out at the point of creation.
• An AI tool touches your work only where you have said it may, for the specific use you were told about. Consent to exhibit is not consent to AI processing, and neither one implies the other.
• The four commitments in section 1 apply in full: your consent before use, compensation where the material generates revenue, control retained by you over your own material, and credit given by name unless you ask for anonymity.
• Nothing from clothesfree or body-based programming is covered by any consent given here. Section 2 governs that material and is not reopened by this section.
• You can withdraw your work at any time. Withdrawal removes it from anything CMW has not already printed.

4. Language Justice

AAVE and Black queer vernacular are not errors to be corrected.

• AI tools do not get final say over CMW’s language. Anything an AI tool flags, corrects, or “cleans up” in Charles’s words or in participant language gets human review before it’s accepted, and the default is to keep the original.
• Culturally specific language, reclaimed terms, and ballroom and Black queer vernacular are preserved deliberately. If an AI tool suggests replacing them with more “neutral” phrasing, that suggestion is rejected as a matter of policy.

5. Accountability When Harm Happens

CMW sorts AI-related harm along its Spectrum of Harm: inconvenience, exclusion, surveillance, misclassification, violence. The response scales with the tier.

When CMW’s own process causes the harm. This is the one place full repair is entirely within CMW’s control, and it applies at every tier. If you believe AI-assisted CMW content or process caused you harm, you have a direct way to say so: email, in person, or through program facilitators. CMW corrects the content or process, states plainly what changed, and you see the correction happen. This is not conditional on the harm being severe. A misapplied name, a mishandled detail, a language “correction” that erased something intentional: all get the same standard. Named, fixed, shown.

When the harm comes from outside CMW (a platform, a vendor, a system the community is forced to navigate):

• Inconvenience: logged. No further action unless it becomes a pattern.
• Exclusion: documented with specifics (what happened, who was affected, what it cost them), the immediate case corrected where possible, and the tool’s continued use for that function put under real review. A repeated pattern from the same tool ends that tool’s use for that function.
• Surveillance: use stopped immediately on discovery. No review period. Anything that tracks, profiles, or logs behavior beyond the specific task it was asked to do does not get a second chance.
• Misclassification: permanent disqualification, consistent with the standing ban on biometric and facial-analysis tools in section 2.
• Violence: categorical refusal of any tool or partnership that feeds into systems capable of this tier (policing, family separation, bail-setting), even indirectly. Where CMW’s community is exposed to a violence-tier system through no choice of CMW’s own, that gets documented and the community is warned directly.

What CMW does with the power it has. CMW cannot sue a platform or force a vendor to change its training data, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What CMW can do, at exclusion tier and above: feed documented incidents into existing coalition evidence pools rather than letting them sit in a file, file formal complaints with regulators when a pattern repeats, and name vendors publicly in CMW’s published work when CMW declines to renew and is confident in the claim.

6. Publication Standards

This covers newsletters, zines, long-form guides, and any AI-assisted content CMW publishes.

• Disclosure: work that involved substantial AI drafting, editing, or research assistance says so. Charles retains full authorship and final judgment on all content regardless of AI involvement.
• Bias review: AI-assisted content gets checked for stereotyping before publication. CMW’s content does not get to reproduce that pattern by accident.
• Fact-checking: claims sourced through AI research get verified against the primary source before publication, not taken on the AI’s word.
• Credit: where a framework or methodology is original to Charles, that origin is stated plainly. Where it comes from someone else, they are credited by name, not absorbed as CMW’s own.

7. Vendor and Tool Vetting

Not every AI tool is equally trustworthy with CMW’s material. Every tool gets checked on two fronts: what it does, and where it runs.

What the tool does. Before a tool touches CMW work, four questions get asked:

• Has this tool, or a close relative of it, been documented targeting or disproportionately burdening a marginalized group?
• Do the tool’s default outputs assume a demographic that isn’t CMW’s community, treating everyone else as an edge case?
• Does the tool claim to protect privacy while actually increasing surveillance of the people using it?
• Is the tool marketed as helping wellness or community organizations while its actual function is data extraction? This is the pitch CMW is most likely to hear directly, and the one easiest to miss when the sales copy sounds warm.

Alongside those: Does the vendor train on user input by default, and can that be turned off? What is the retention policy, and does CMW’s data get deleted on request? Is there a stated way to report harm? Has the tool been documented, in peer-reviewed research or credible reporting, to carry racial, gender, or queer bias?

Where the tool runs. A tool can pass every question above and still be built on infrastructure that harms CMW’s community. Before adopting a major vendor, CMW checks the public record for documented environmental or community harm from that vendor’s infrastructure. Avoiding all cloud computing is not realistic for a solo practitioner, so this check is weighed rather than treated as automatically decisive. Weighed, not ignored.

Tools that fail more than one check get used cautiously, with more human review, or not at all for sensitive material.

8. Platform Strategy

Platforms are treated as untrusted distribution, not primary storage.

• Owned channels (the newsletter, the zine, charlesnarles.com) hold the real archive. Platforms are where CMW shows up, knowing the content could disappear without explanation.
• Every takedown, shadowban, or unexplained reach drop gets documented: date, content, platform, what happened. CMW keeps its own evidence rather than relying on platform transparency that doesn’t exist.
• Where deliberate word substitution is needed to avoid moderation flags, it gets used, and the original uncensored version is always preserved in CMW’s own archive.

9. International Programming

Retreats and programs held outside the United States carry cross-border data risk that domestic programs don’t.

• Participant consent for AI-assisted data handling is confirmed under the laws of both the participant’s home country and the host country, whichever is more protective.
• Participants traveling from or through countries with anti-LGBTQ laws are flagged internally, with their knowledge and consent, so that no AI-assisted communication, marketing material, or data storage creates a paper trail that could expose them.
• Local data protection law at the retreat site is researched and followed in addition to CMW’s own standards, not instead of them.

10. Community Governance

This policy is not Charles’s alone to hold. The operating principle is a simple one: nothing about us without us.

• This policy is reviewed at least annually, and any time a new AI capability or tool enters CMW’s practice.
• A standing invitation exists for QTPOC community members, especially those in clothesfree, body-based, or identity-specific programs, to weigh in on how AI touches programs that involve their bodies and stories. The channel stays open between programs, not only when a program is being planned.
• Charles holds final decision authority as founder, and community input on this policy is sought deliberately, not incidentally.

11. What This Policy Does Not Resolve

The edges, stated plainly:

• CMW can secure real, specific consent from its own participants under sections 1, 2 and 3. CMW cannot secure consent from the millions of uncredited people whose language and thought are already compressed into whatever tool CMW uses on a given day. This policy states that gap plainly instead of calling it settled, and refuses to pretend the consent CMW can get is the whole of the consent that’s owed.
• Material already used to train these systems before anyone was asked has no full remedy yet. This policy holds the line going forward. It does not claim to undo what’s already been taken.
• This policy will be wrong in places. It gets fixed in the open, through the governance process in section 10, not quietly.