i wanted to provide a little more context around what happened, and why we were changing the system prompt. gotta beat those reddit allegations, trust

what happened

on wednesday night pacific time, we tested a system prompt to ensure that some content being produced by jllm is compliant with our terms of service. this ended up blocking a bunch of random nsfw stuff that we did not want to block.

the changes were targeted exclusively at three kinds of illegal content: underage characters, bestiality (excluding furry content), and incest content (excluding stepcest). these kinds of content have always been against our content guidelines and moderation policies, and we dont want that kind of content on the site.

we didnt announce these changes because we thought it wouldnt have any real impact on the content, and it was designed to be very specifically targeted at the above illegal stuff.

we rolled out some additional csam precautions earlier (around 3 months ago) and it did not cause any problems. we also made some changes to stop people from uploading lots of images of random real people, which had spiked as a problem recently. where groomers were making bots of people they know irl. we thought (mistakenly) that this would be equally smooth.

as you guys noticed it was not.

once we saw a bunch of stuff was getting blocked, we pushed a rollback almost immediately, and had thought that it was fixed.

however, it turned out that our build server was having errors and had crashed, so the old version didnt go back to live. we then frantically spent the next couple hours trying to get the build server back online, and once we did, were able to undo the moderation change.

this left you guys in the dark for a couple hours with huge moderation changes that we did not intend to do. im sorry about that.

also, some of you mlp creators got accidentally banned by our mod system. we reverted that too - sorry about that! were working on making the auto mod better so if you make a bot that breaks tos, you wont get banned. the bot will just be hidden from public and will tell you why. that way you can fix it without getting banned.

why we made these changes

as you guys know, running janitor is really expensive. we want to launch a membership to help offset some of the server costs and allow us to hire more people and speed up a bunch of the long-overdue features were super excited about. its really important to me that janitor is able to be here for the long haul.

to be able to do this, we need a payment processor. this means we have to pass a banks underwriting process. banks, as you may be shocked to learn, are conservative. both ai and nsfw content make them nervous.

weve been working hard to find a bank that will allow us to keep all of the nsfw content on our site. as weve made clear from the beginning, were not willing to go the way of other sites and sacrifice the community to try to make some random bank happy.

weve found a few that are happy to let us have our content. however, they are very strict about content that is illegal in the us – in specific, csam, bestiality (that isnt furry content), and incest (not stepcest). this stuff has always been against our content policy, and we dont want it on our site.

as part of their underwriting process, the banks have tried to jailbreak the model to produce this illegal content. we already have some moderation on this, but they were able to find ways around it, so we pushed a change to the system prompt designed to fix this.

we screwed up! it broke lots of things. thats why we tried to roll it back immediately. once the buildkite server went down, we found ourselves unable to make any changes until we got that back online. as soon as we got that back up, we were able to undo the changes.

whats next

its really important to me that we get this right so that janitor can continue to exist, and that we can keep paying our (scarily large) server bill.

once we get payments sorted, we can buy more gpus 🙂, launch new features faster, and continue to make janitor the creative playground we all want it to be.

we have a bunch of really cool features we want to launch, and i hate working on this stuff — it distracts from the fun stuff that is actually important. but it is something we have to do if we want to continue to exist long term.

were going to work on finding a better way to stop the llm from generating this specific illegal content without breaking anything else, and will update you guys as it rolls out. this might be an improved system prompt, or some other kind of control. were figuring this out with you guys.

i really appreciate everyones patience here, and i know it can be really frustrating. its crazy to see how big the site has gotten, and sometimes i still just push stuff into prod like i was the only user — but when it breaks, its not just breaking for me.

i know youve been hearing this a lot, but we really are grateful for u all ❤️. you guys are what makes janitor what it is.