Creative Pass · built on Egoist AI Passport

Consent should be resolved, not declared once.

Today a creator's only way to tell AI what it may do with their work is one switch in a text file — read at crawl time, by whoever bothers, and impossible to take back. Ask First moves that answer onto the creator's AI Passport and makes systems fetch it at the moment they act.

Explore it yourself 90 seconds · nothing to install
01

Why creators keep getting used without consent, or payment

It is tempting to read this as an ethics failure — companies behaving badly, creators too small to stop them. That is not quite what is happening. Creators are not losing this because they said yes. They are losing it because there was never a way to be asked. Five mechanisms are missing, and every one of them makes taking cheaper than asking.

01
There is nobody to ask
A company that genuinely wants permission has no address to send the question to and no way to record the answer. Consent is not being refused — it is unaskable. So the scrupulous and the shameless end up behaving identically, which is the clearest sign a mechanism is missing rather than a moral.
02
Silence is read as yes
Absence of a signal is treated as permission. A photographer who has never heard of robots.txt has, by default, agreed to everything. The burden sits on the person with the least power and the least warning — and it is a burden that has to be renewed on every platform they post to.
03
You find out years later
The work is taken once, quietly, at crawl time. The harm surfaces much later, in someone's generated output. By then there is no counterparty, no trail, and no moment at which a decision could have been recorded — so even a creator willing to fight has nothing to point at.
04
Refusing costs you and teaches you nothing
Block everything and you lose discovery, which for most creators is the livelihood. And a refusal is a dead end: you never learn who wanted you or what for. Saying no destroys the deal instead of starting the negotiation.
05
There is no unit small enough to sell
Licensing works for the famous, through lawyers, over months. There is no per-use, per-type, machine-speed unit — so a vendor licenses a handful of names and scrapes everyone else. That is not malice. It is arithmetic, and it will not change until the small unit exists.
Every one of these is a missing mechanism, not a missing law.

Who it is for

Working creators

Musicians, illustrators, essayists, voice actors, photographers, performers — anyone whose recognisable output is the asset. Crucially they are not anti-AI. They want indexing and citation, because that is distribution. They refuse voice cloning, because that is impersonation. Today they cannot say both.

Who pays for it

The AI vendors

Not the creators. Voice, likeness and generation platforms already cannot close enterprise deals without consent provenance — agencies demand indemnification. A vendor who can produce receipts can sell; one who cannot, increasingly cannot. Creators stay free, matching the Passport's free-for-life promise.

Is it only for creators?

No — but that is where it should start

The primitive is general. Use-time resolution, expiring leases and content-free receipts are the same shape whether what travels is a licence, a workplace credential, an agent's spending limit, or an eligibility proof. We aimed it at creative rights because that is where the absence bites hardest today — and because a mechanism should be proven somewhere specific before it is sold as a platform.

02

One bit, versus the answer creators actually have

A creator's honest position is nine independent decisions, and each one changes depending on who is asking. Almost all of them want to be findable — that is distribution. Almost none want their voice cloned — that is impersonation. There is currently no way to say “find me, but do not become me.” Here is the whole vocabulary they have today, next to the one they should have.

What a creator has today
One answer,
for everyone,
forever
robots.txt · ai.txt · a terms page nobody reads
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
# that's it. that's the whole vocabulary.
Deny
Allow
One bit, and it is the wrong bit. Read once, at crawl time, by whoever chooses to. It cannot tell a university from an ad agency, cannot separate being indexed from being impersonated, and cannot be taken back once read.
What a creator has with
Ask First
A different answer for each thing you might do, and each kind of person who might ask.
↓ who is asking →
yes allowed automatically
ask comes to me to decide
no refused, and I still see they asked
36 positions, each set independently and each revocable on its own. Read at the moment of use — so changing one square changes the answer everywhere, including on copies already in circulation. This grid is live: edit the policy in the console below and watch it move.
03

The loop

The published work carries only a pointer to the creator's Passport — never the permission itself. That single design choice is what makes withdrawal mean something: there is no stale copy of the answer anywhere to go out of date. These steps light up as the demo runs.

01
Work carries a pointer
Not a licence. ego:junokade — inert, and useless on its own.
02
Requester resolves
At the moment of use. Identity comes from a credential, never self-declared.
03
Policy decides
Allow, ask, or deny — computed against use-type, class and commercial posture.
04
Lease, or nothing
An expiring handle with obligations. Killable mid-job. Never the permission itself.
05
Receipt, both ways
Content-free. Refusals logged too — that is where the demand signal lives.
04

The working console

Everything below is live. Change the policy on the left, resolve on the right, watch the answer change.

Guided demo Press Start for the 90-second walkthrough — or just start clicking, nothing here can break.

1 · Passport standing policy

Egoist AI Passport
Juno Kade
@junokade · demo persona
Electronic producer bending broken rhythms and neon synths into late-night dance music. Based in Berlin, playing loud everywhere else.
Passportego:junokade
Works bound41
Policy versionv7
Policy lives on the Passport, not in the files. RES / COM / IND / PLT set which requester classes each use-type is open to — click them.

2 · Resolver proposed: passport.ego.ist/creative/resolve

The call a requester makes at the moment it wants to act — not when it crawled the work months ago. requester_class is asserted by Egoist against a credential, never read from the request body, or an ad agency would simply declare itself a research lab.
Awaiting request
The resolver never sees the prompt, the output, or the asset. It sees who is asking, for what, under what terms.
// POST /creative/resolve

// press Resolve to see the requester-facing response

3 · Live leases 0 active

An allow does not hand over a licence — it mints a lease that dies on its own and must be re-verified before each covered act. TTLs are compressed to 20 seconds here so you can watch one expire.
No active leases.

4 · Demand inbox refusals worth money

A creator who refuses today learns nothing and the demand evaporates. Here a commercial refusal surfaces who wanted what, and lets her name a price instead of losing the deal in silence.
No offers yet. Refuse a commercial request to generate one.

5 · Receipts my.ego.ist/activity

Content-free, and asymmetric: the requester gets an opaque code, the creator gets the reason. Returning the policy path would let anyone reconstruct the whole policy in eighteen calls.
No activity yet.
05

What it enforces, and what it only makes legible

The first question anyone serious will ask, answered before they have to ask it.

The honest limit

Consent protocols are either custody-based — the intermediary holds the asset and can withhold it — or declaration-based, holding nothing and instead making the permission state legible and non-repudiable.

This is declaration-based for public work, because the alternative means Egoist holding every creator's catalogue: a concentration risk worse than the problem. So a lease does not stop someone who already scraped a track. It changes what they can later claim — “the opt-out was ambiguous, we didn't know” stops working when there was a machine-readable answer at a known address.

It is custody-based where custody exists — voice models, likeness reference, unreleased stems. There the lease gates the actual bits. And nothing here un-trains a model. No consent layer can.

Why requesters adopt first

“Why would a scraper voluntarily call your resolver?” It wouldn't. You don't convince the scraper — you convince the scraper's customer.

Agencies and brands buying creative-AI tools already demand indemnification, and vendors already compete on licensed data. A vendor who can produce resolution receipts can sell into that market. One who can't, increasingly can't. The receipt isn't a compliance chore — it's the artifact they show the client.

Which answers who pays: requesters pay for consent provenance they can put in a contract. Creators pay nothing, matching the Passport's free-for-life promise.

Next to existing work

The field is not empty and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose credibility. IETF AI-preferences is standardising vocabulary past the single bit. RSL attaches licensing terms to content. C2PA carries data-mining assertions. Cloudflare pay-per-crawl puts a toll booth in the network path.

All four are anchored to content or origin and read once, at fetch. Creative Pass is anchored to a person and read at use — which is what makes withdrawal mean something and per-requester answers possible. It composes with all four; the pointer can ride inside a C2PA assertion.

First version: one voice or likeness platform with an enterprise sales problem, plus Egoist's creator base onboarding at ego.ist/i/you. Not a standards coalition.