Terms of Use

Collaborative AI Canvas — a time-boxed art experiment

Please read: This is a plain-language document for a non-commercial art experiment; it is not legal advice. A review by a German lawyer is planned before any commercial use.

By drawing a shape, submitting a prompt, or otherwise participating on this site, you agree to these Terms of Use. If you do not agree, please just watch — viewing the canvas requires nothing from you.

1. What this is

Collaborative AI Canvas is a time-boxed, non-commercial art experiment. For a limited period (roughly 48 hours), anyone can draw a shape on a shared public canvas and submit a short text prompt (up to 500 characters). Roughly every 30 seconds, one submission is picked at random from those received in that round, and an AI image model generates artwork into the winning shape. The result is painted onto the shared canvas for everyone to see.

Participation is entirely voluntary and free of charge. There is no account, no payment, no reward, no prize and no promise that your submission will ever be selected — selection is a random lottery. The operator runs this project at their own cost and generates no revenue from it. Nothing here is a contract for services, and no one owes anyone performance of any kind.

Everything on the canvas is public. Anyone can see it, screenshot it, and share it. After the event ends, the operator intends to produce a timelapse film and other derivative works from the recorded event log and the finished canvas.

2. Rights in your submission

Purely AI-generated images may not attract copyright at all in many jurisdictions. To the extent any rights nevertheless exist in what you submit or in what the AI produces from it, this section settles who holds them, so that the resulting collective artwork and the later film can be used without ambiguity.

When you submit a prompt and/or a shape, you agree to the following with respect to that prompt, that shape, and the image generated from them (together, the “Contribution”):

Assignment. You assign to the site operator, to the fullest extent legally possible, any and all rights, title and interest you may hold in the Contribution — worldwide, for the full term of those rights, including all renewals and extensions, and including all rights of exploitation in all known and future media and forms of use.
Licence fallback. To the extent such an assignment is not legally possible (for example under German copyright law, where authorship itself cannot be transferred), you instead grant the site operator a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, exclusive-where-permitted, sublicensable and transferable licence to use, reproduce, store, modify, adapt, translate, combine with other works, distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, broadcast, make available online and commercially exploit the Contribution in any medium and for any purpose. This expressly includes documentary and timelapse films, exhibitions, merchandise, prints and other physical editions, promotional use, and archival and educational use.
Moral rights. To the extent permitted by applicable law, you waive — and agree not to assert — moral rights and comparable claims in the Contribution, including any right of attribution and any right to object to modification, distortion, recombination, overpainting or other treatment of it. Where such a waiver is not permitted, you agree not to exercise those rights in a way that would prevent the uses described in section 2.2. No attribution or credit will be given, and none is owed — contributions are anonymous by design.
Your warranty. You confirm that you are entitled to submit the Contribution; that it is your own and does not infringe anyone else's copyright, trademark, personality, privacy or other rights; and that no third party's consent is required for the uses described above. If you are participating on behalf of someone else, or if you are a minor where local law requires it, you confirm you have the necessary permission.
No compensation. The assignment and licence above are granted free of charge. You will receive no payment, royalty, share of proceeds or other compensation, now or later, including if the project or any derivative work is ever monetised.

3. Acceptable use

Do not submit, and do not attempt to cause the generation of:

content that is illegal under German or applicable law;
sexual content involving minors, or any sexualised depiction of children — this is an absolute prohibition and will be reported where required by law;
harassment, threats, doxxing, or content targeting a specific individual;
depictions of real, identifiable people (including public figures);
hate symbols, extremist or unconstitutional symbols, or content inciting hatred or violence against people or groups;
content designed to deceive, defame, or impersonate;
anything intended to bypass or defeat the moderation filters, the bot check, or the rate limits — including prompt-injection attempts, automated or scripted submissions, multiple parallel sessions, or other manipulation of the selection lottery.

Submissions pass through automated moderation before and during generation. Submissions may be rejected automatically and without explanation. The operator may additionally remove, overpaint, edit or delete any content, and may block or rate-limit any visitor or network, at their sole discretion, at any time, without notice and without giving reasons.

Overpainting is a feature. The canvas is shared and mutable. Any area you contribute to may later be drawn over, partly covered, or entirely replaced by other participants' shapes. Nothing on the canvas is permanent or reserved, and you acquire no claim to any region of it.

4. No warranty, no liability

The site and everything on it are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, availability, uninterrupted operation, accuracy or non-infringement.

The canvas, individual contributions and all generated outputs may be altered, moved, overpainted, reset or deleted at any time, without notice and without backup. The experiment may be paused, shortened or ended early for any reason — for example if the image-generation budget is exhausted, if abuse makes continued operation impractical, or if the operator simply stops it. No participation, no submission and no visible result is guaranteed.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the operator is not liable for any damages arising from your use of the site, from content submitted by others, from AI-generated output, or from loss or alteration of contributions. Nothing in these terms limits liability where it cannot lawfully be limited — in particular for injury to life, body or health, for intent or gross negligence, or under the German Product Liability Act. Where liability for ordinary negligence in respect of a material contractual duty cannot be excluded, it is limited to typical, foreseeable damage.

You are responsible for what you submit and agree to hold the operator harmless from third-party claims arising from your Contribution breaching section 2.4 or section 3.

5. AI-generated output

Images on this canvas are produced by a third-party AI image model from participants' text prompts, combined with a fixed system prompt written by the operator, and constrained to the submitted shape. Output is probabilistic: it may be inaccurate, unexpected, nonsensical, unrelated to the prompt, aesthetically disappointing, or refused outright by the model's own safety filters. None of that is a defect.

Contributors obtain no ownership of, and no rights in, any generated output — neither in the image produced from their own prompt, nor in the canvas, nor in the collective work, nor in any derivative work such as the timelapse film. Prompts are not published; only the resulting images and shapes appear publicly (see the Privacy Policy).

The operator makes no claim that any individual generated tile is protected by copyright, and no representation about the copyright status of AI-generated images generally.

6. Governing law and severability

These terms are governed by the law of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer resident in the EU, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of your country of residence.

If any provision of these terms is or becomes invalid, void or unenforceable, the validity of the remaining provisions is unaffected. The invalid provision shall be replaced by a valid one that comes closest to its economic and practical purpose. The same applies to any gap in these terms.

The operator may amend these terms; the version published on this page at the time of your submission applies to that submission.

7. Contact

Questions, rights complaints, takedown requests and legal notices can be sent via the contact channel listed in the site footer.