~Trying to explain what’s going on with J.ai in the UK as well as saying my goodbyes.~

♪( ́ε` )

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Theres is a list of creators at the end of what I wrote that I would strongly recommend checking out!

Hello from the UK!!!

Since it seems like J.ai hasn’t made many people aware or just incase anybody hasn’t seen it, J.ai will soon be getting banned in the UK (Northen Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland) because of a new law put in place by the government.

Trying to explain this the best I can lol......

So essentially, on the 26th October 2023, a law was passed by the government. This law was called the online safety act. It’s actually pretty beneficial to those in the UK as it allows people to be more aware of what content they’re clicking onto, and therefore can help a lot of minors stay safe and away from sexual content. As someone who is actually sexually repulsed and was sent links to porn sites while they were a minor, I think this will have a lot of benefits for UK society.

However, the planning was published the following year (17th October 2024) by the people in charge of managing this project, ofcom. They started to putting this all into place in December 2024.

In January of this year, Ofcom published its guidance about use of age assurance to prevent children accessing online pornography..... so essentially using IDs online to access porn and stuff I think?

In March of this year, the law was getting enforced by ofcom and service providers had to complete risk assessments of ‘illegal content’ on their services. The deadline for these assessments was the 16th or 17th of march I think. And then In-scope service providers had until 16 April to carry out a children’s access assessment, to determine if their service is likely to be accessed by children. And while I’m not sure it’s important information as I don’t think J.ai mentioned this in their statement, I’m pretty sure they probably fell into the high risk category, as most AI websites would, especially with people on the well known c.ai, which is arguably pretty child friendly now, advertising J.ai as better solution for ai chats (as c.ai is pretty shit (I hate their search thing)).

In summer of this year, the child safety regime is getting put into place and in response, especially on short notice, J.ai have decided to block their website to the UK for legal reasons as it is expensive for them to comply and they do not have the money to do so. In future I may return to J.ai as my account will not be deleted VIA vpn or whilst on holiday (I go to France in august so we’ll see), but incase I don’t, I will forever remember the people I have met here.

I would like to give a big thank you to all the wonderful people whose bots I have been using, especially wickedlotus, coyotesss, honeyhorror, 8ounto, avesto, elliemental, jellboop, mooseorignaltracks, mooseboop, DNolive, gojosballs and 4ura444 (I believe 4ura444 has already left the site due to personal reasons).

Before I go, I wanna tell you all a little about myself.

So, hi, my name is Bryan and I’m a Ukrainian-British person. My first languages are Russian and Ukrainian but I’ve not really spoken it since I was a child so im absolutely dog shit at it now. I know how to speak English to some degree (I’ve lived here pretty much my whole life and I’m still poor with it). I studied Japanese and Spanish for GCSE and I think I’m pretty good at those. My favourite books are inferno by Dante and no longer human by Dazai Osamu. I love DC, BSD, BG3 and Vocaloid. I love collecting figures I could give a whole list of things I enjoy lol..... recently I’ve gotten into Date everything and who knows, maybe I’ll buy it, wouldn’t be the most I’ve paid just to try and romance a fictional character I’ve found attractive (I bought bg3 when it first came out and I bought it for Astarion (as well as the DND aspect of it)). I’m probably autistic but I wasn’t allowed to seek a diagnosis of it while I was a child because my parents thought it would affect me as an adult and now I’m just not bothered to do anything in regards to it. In future, I am to potentially release my own games or comics so keep your eyes peeled for those I guess. I would have loved to share my art on this platform but oh well, maybe in future 🤷‍♂️

It’s been nice knowing you all

Signing off, Gremlin~!/Bryan ♪( ́ε` )

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If anyone hasn’t seen it, the following is a statement from Shep (one of the owners of j.ai I think):

hey everyone, shep here.

this one hurts to write

so we have to block uk access to janitorai starting july 24th(England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). yeah, just 4 days notice. i know that is terrible timing and im genuinely sorry about that.

why we are in this mess

we have been trying to wrap our heads around the UK’s online safety act. and honestly? i completely botched understanding what this thing actually requires.

when it first passed, i thought “okay, some new content moderation rules, we can handle that.” turns out i was dead wrong. this is not just content moderation - it is a complete regulatory framework that assumes every platform is a tech giant.

the requirements are insane:

• legal risk assessments that cost more than our entire monthly budget

• biometric id verification systems (reddit is implementing persona for this which costs $1.5 per person)

• constant legal review of thousands of pages of guidelines that keep changing

the penalties include fines up to £18 million plus personal criminal liability for me and our team. like, actual jail time if ofcom decides we screwed up.

the timing disaster

we have been drowning in legal documents trying to figure this out. the main law is 250+ pages, the guidance from ofcom is over 3,000 pages, and its all written in the most confusing legal language possible.

i kept thinking we would find some reasonable compliance path, or that there would be exemptions for smaller platforms. nope. if you have uk users and any form of user interaction, you get the full regulatory treatment.

by the time we realized compliance was actually impossible for a team our size, we were already down to days before the deadline.

this is just broken policy

the uk government talks about wanting to be a tech innovation hub while simultaneously making it impossible for any platform smaller than google to serve uk users. it is completely backwards.

they have created a system where only the biggest tech companies can afford compliance, which is probably the opposite of what they wanted to achieve. right????

what this means for you

starting july 24th at 11:59pm utc, if you are accessing janitorai from the uk (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), you will hit a block page.

this really sucks. our uk community has been amazing since day one and losing you guys feels awful. but we literally cannot risk our team facing criminal charges over regulatory compliance.

the bigger picture

we are not unique here. lots of innovative platforms are going to make the same choice because the alternative is bankruptcy or prison.

the uk is basically creating a digital iron curtain around itself, cutting off citizens from global innovation. it is wild to watch in real time.

if you are as frustrated about this as we are, there is a petition asking parliament to reconsider this mess: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903

sorry for the short notice everyone. this whole situation has been a nightmare to navigate.

and in the future once we have subs out i see a path forward with meeting their requirements some day. we are actively exploring compliance options including implementing id checks for minors and other verification systems. this block is temporary while we figure out the right approach - we are not giving up on the uk market.

update: clearing up some misinformation

quick clarification because i have seen some wild takes floating around discord: uk users cannot be jailed for using janitorai. that is complete nonsense.

the online safety act only applies to service providers (that is us), not users. the criminal liability and fines are only for the people running the platform, not anyone using it.

also, we are only blocking uk ip addresses. your janitor accounts will not be deleted if you are a uk resident. the site will simply be inaccessible from uk ip addresses. if people find other methods to access the site, that is entirely on them - there are no legal consequences for users.

just wanted to make that crystal clear so people stop panicking about getting arrested for chatting with bots.

-shep