What stays on your device, and what does not.

To keep the site usable across visits, this browser may hold a small amount of state:

• which essays you have opened;
• your Reading or Immersive preference;
• reading position within an essay;
• answers you give inside an Experience, kept for the browser session only;
• any other Known Artificial reading preference the site sets.

These local-state items stay on your device. They are not transmitted to Known Artificial, and no account or profile is created from them. Some items persist across visits; others last for the browser session. The inspector below clears the entries described there. Your browser’s site-data controls can remove other storage associated with this site.

An email address leaves your browser only if you deliberately subscribe to Known Artificial Dispatches. No email address or form content is collected in the background.

Known Artificial is the publication asking for the subscription, and it decides what is sent. Your address goes to Known Artificial’s own mail service, not to a third-party form. What is kept is the address itself, which page you subscribed from, whether you have confirmed, and which Dispatches have been sent to you. Nothing else — no IP address, no browser or device information, and no record of whether you opened anything.

That record — the subscription itself — is held in a database hosted in the European Union.

• Purpose. Sending Known Artificial Dispatches. Nothing else.
• Basis. Your consent, given by submitting the form and then confirming it.
• Confirmation. Submitting the form does not subscribe you. A confirmation email is sent, and nothing is delivered until you accept it. An unconfirmed address never receives a Dispatch, and the confirmation link expires after 48 hours.
• Withdrawal. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in every Dispatch. One click is enough. There is no account to sign into and no reason to give.
• No tracking. The Dispatches carry no tracking pixel and no measured links, and nothing records whether you opened or read one.

Resend delivers the Dispatches on our behalf and holds a copy of your address in order to do it. It is a processor, not the record: the subscription itself is held by Known Artificial, and unsubscribing removes you from both. That copy is stored outside the European Union, in the United States, under a data-processing agreement and the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses. It is the address, and what happened to the mail sent to it — delivered, bounced, unsubscribed — and nothing more. Your address is not sold, not shared for unrelated marketing, and not reused for any purpose other than the Dispatch. How Resend handles your address.

To have your address removed, or to ask what is held about it, unsubscribe or write to the publication.

If you write to the publication by email, that message travels through your own email service in the normal way. The site also has one form you can send a message through, and the section below says exactly what happens to it.

Under every essay, and on Share your thoughts, there is a form for telling the editors what you made of something. Using it is always your decision. Nothing is collected in the background, and nothing you type is sent anywhere until you press send.

• What is kept. Your message, whether you said it was about a page, the publication or a technical problem, and which public page you were on. Nothing else.
• The page. Only a plain public address such as /essay/what-changes-when-ai-enters-the-room, checked against a fixed list of published pages. Never a query string, never the part of a link after a #, and never a Letter address.
• Your address, only if you ask. The reply box is off unless you turn it on, and no address is asked for until you do. A message without one is complete. If you do give one, it is used to write back about that message and nothing else. It is not confirmed, not added to Dispatches, and nothing is sent to it automatically.
• No account is needed. The form’s own code does not set cookies or write to browser storage. The infrastructure delivering this website does set cookies: __cf_bm and __dpl were observed during our checks. Opening the form also loads Turnstile, which was observed storing an item named cf.turnstile.u in your browser under Cloudflare’s address.
• Your network address. Not stored with your message. A salted hash of it is kept separately to limit repeated submissions within a ten-minute window; sending again inside an active window does not extend it. Once a window has expired, the record is eligible for deletion by the scheduled cleanup.
• Not published. Messages are private to the editors. Nothing is posted on the site, shown to other readers, or quoted anywhere without asking you first.
• Not the research. Sending a message is not taking part in a study. It counts towards no published signal and no participant total, and it is kept apart from the Reader Signal counts described below.
• No automatic reply or AI summary. No acknowledgement email is sent, no automated reply is written, no model summarises or scores it, and no link inside it is opened. Not every message gets a reply.
• Where it is held. In a database in the European Union that holds nothing else: not the subscriber list, not the reading measurement, not the Reader Signal counts. Only the editors can read it, through a private page behind a passcode. There is no public way to read any of it.
• How long. Your message and, if you gave one, your reply address are scheduled for deletion 90 days after they arrive. A message marked as spam is scheduled for deletion 14 days after it is marked, or at the 90-day limit, whichever comes first. Flagging a message to come back to does not extend that. The cleanup that carries out scheduled deletions is scheduled to run hourly.
• Sooner, if you ask. You can have yours deleted before then by writing to the publication. Say roughly when you sent it and what it was about, so it can be found: there is no account to look it up by. Deleting it removes the message and the address at once, not at the next sweep.
• What is kept for a day. Sending the form leaves one technical record so that a lost connection cannot turn one message into two: a random identifier for that submission and a one-way fingerprint of what it contained. It holds none of your words and no address. It expires 24 hours after it is created and then becomes eligible for deletion by the scheduled cleanup. Until it expires, resending the same content with the same submission identifier is recognised as the same submission rather than stored twice. These durations are choices about how this publication works, not legal periods.

The form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which loads when you open the form. The website itself is also delivered through Cloudflare, including when you browse without opening the form. How Cloudflare handles it.

Criticism is not treated as spam. Nothing reads your message for tone, and no message is refused for being angry, blunt or unconvinced. What the form refuses is an empty message, one over two thousand characters, and one that fails the automated check.

Season 01 subscribers receive six letters. Each one ends in a question, and the writing that answers it lives on this site rather than in the mail. Two things about that are worth stating plainly, because neither is obvious from the outside.

How the letter opens.

Every letter has the same web address for every reader. What differs is the key: the link in your email carries an access key for that one letter, and the page will not show the writing without it. A key for the first letter does not open the second. The key travels in the fragment of the link — the part after the # — which browsers keep to themselves and do not send with the request for the page, so it reaches no server log, no proxy and no referrer header. It carries no answer of yours and no name. Known Artificial keeps no record connecting a key to a subscriber.

What it cannot do is travel invisibly. The letter is an email, and the provider that delivers it necessarily handles its contents, the link included. That is true of every link in every email anyone sends, and it is stated here rather than left for you to work out.

What the count records.

A letter asks you to choose, shows you what the choice carries, and then asks whether you would still choose the same way. You may add that movement to a public count. It is optional, and it is the only part of a letter that sends anything anywhere.

• Until you choose to contribute, both of your answers stay in your browser. Reading a letter, answering it and closing it sends nothing.
• If you do contribute, what is sent is: which question it was, which version of that question, which of the possible movements between a first and second answer yours was, and which collection period it falls in. That is the whole message.
• Your address is not part of it, and neither is anything else that identifies you. The letter’s own key is used to check that a reader holds a letter and has not already been counted for it. The check is on the key, not on a person.
• Contributions are held as totals. There is no individual response to retrieve, yours included, because a contribution becomes part of a counter and stops existing separately.
• A result is published only once its totals are large enough that no reader can be picked out of them. Below that, the count is held and nothing is shown.

The counters are kept by Known Artificial on infrastructure separate from the subscriber list. The two are not joined, and nothing in the count can be traced back to the mail record.

Known Artificial uses first-party measurement to understand how the public work is used and where it can be improved. It does not use GA4, Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, Meta Pixel, advertising cookies or cross-site tracking, and behavioural measurement is not sent to an advertising network or data broker.

On measured public pages, the site can record the page or route, a broad source category and, for some external referrals, the bare referring hostname; a coarse device and viewport class; active foreground attention; movement to other Known Artificial pages; and semantic interactions with the work. For essays, that can include article depth, which sections were reached, attention by section, meaningful returns to an earlier section, opening the source note and continuing to other Known Artificial content. For the Exhibit, it can include its actual stages, progress, completion, replay, fixed failure states and evidence follow-through.

It does not record session replay, cursor paths, mouse movement history, key presses, form contents, camera or microphone input, exact location, a raw user-agent, or a reader IP or IP hash for behavioural measurement.

A random visit identifier is generated in the tab’s memory and is used only to connect events from that same visit. It is not written to cookies, localStorage, sessionStorage, IndexedDB or another browser store; it does not survive a reload as a returning-reader identity; and it is not derived from your identity. During processing, that temporary identifier is included in short-lived visit-level measurement rows. Those rows are deleted within twenty-six hours. The durable record consists of aggregate counts and distributions and contains no visit identifier.

Some temporary events contain duration values so that attention and stage timing can be aggregated. The durable analytics keep those durations as fixed ranges rather than a permanent list of individual timings.

For essays, Known Artificial also computes a behavioural proxy called Strong Read-Through. It combines substantial article depth, semantic section coverage, active foreground attention and observed interaction. It is not proof that an essay was read, understood, liked or agreed with.

Behavioural analytics is not joined to Dispatch subscriber records, Reader Signal contributions or protected Letter capabilities. Protected Letters are structurally excluded from behavioural measurement: reading a Letter, making its choices, viewing its path and closing it sends no behavioural analytics. Reader Signal remains a separate system for an answer a reader explicitly chooses to contribute.

Measurement is handled by Known Artificial’s own first-party analytics service on Cloudflare infrastructure, with the analytics database configured for EU jurisdiction. No third-party analytics or advertising service receives this behavioural dataset. Other services used to deliver the site or mail remain separate from it.