Terms of service

ProtoHuman is a research instrument. It runs a language model pipeline over a word you submit and returns a proposed derivation to a Shona root, together with a confidence score and a statement of the mainstream position.

The derivations are a working hypothesis, not settled comparative linguistics. Mainstream historical linguistics does not hold that Indo-European and Niger-Congo share a recoverable common ancestor at the depth the comparative method reaches. Every result carries the consensus view alongside our own so both readings stay visible. Do not present output from this service as established scholarship.

Output is generated per query by a language model. It can be wrong, and it will sometimes be confidently wrong. Verify anything you intend to rely on.

You need an account to run a fresh analysis, to vote, or to propose a correction. Reading the corpus needs no account and never will.

Accounts are handled by Clerk. You are responsible for keeping access to your account secure and for activity that happens under it. Tell us at team@protohuman.xyz if you think someone else has got in.

You must be old enough to enter a contract where you live. One account per person. Do not create additional accounts to influence a vote.

A subscription grants a fixed number of credits at the start of each billing period. One credit runs one fresh analysis. Reading a word that is already in the corpus costs nothing, for you or for anyone else, and proposing a correction is always free.

Credits are a metering unit, not currency. They have no cash value, cannot be transferred or exchanged, and unused credits do not carry into the next period.

If an analysis fails before it produces a stored result, the credit is returned to your balance automatically. If you think you have been charged for something you did not get, write to team@protohuman.xyz and we will look at the ledger.

Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card details. Prices are in US dollars and exclude any tax that may apply where you are.

You can cancel at any time from your account page. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and you keep access and any remaining credits until then. You can undo a cancellation any time before the period closes.

We do not offer partial refunds for an unused part of a period. This does not affect any statutory right to cancel or to a refund that you have where you live, and those rights take precedence over this paragraph.

We may change the price or the number of included credits. If we do, we will tell you before it affects your next period, and you can cancel rather than accept the change.

The corpus is public. Every word traced, the derivation it landed on, the vote counts, and the handle of whoever first traced it are all visible without an account and are indexed by search engines.

When you vote, propose a correction, or trace a word, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, display, publish and adapt that contribution as part of the corpus, including after you close your account. You keep whatever rights you already had in what you submitted.

Contribute only what you have the right to contribute. Do not paste in material that belongs to someone else.

We may remove or reverse any entry, vote or correction, and may reopen an entry the community has ratified, where we think the record is wrong or the process was abused.

Do not:

Automate access outside a documented interface, or attempt to extract the corpus in bulk. Create multiple accounts to move a vote. Submit input designed to manipulate the model into producing harmful or off-topic output. Interfere with the service or with other people using it. Use the service to harass anyone, or to present fabricated scholarship as genuine.

There is a per-account rate limit independent of your credit balance. We may suspend an account that repeatedly trips it, or that we reasonably believe is being used in any of the ways above.

The service depends on third parties, including OpenAI, Clerk, Stripe and our database provider. We do not promise uninterrupted availability, and any of those dependencies can fail in ways outside our control.

We may change or withdraw features. If we retire something you rely on, we will make a reasonable effort to say so first.

The service is provided as it is. To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties, including any warranty that the output is accurate, complete, or fit for a particular purpose.

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim connected with the service is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

You can close your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms. Contributions already in the corpus remain there under the licence in clause 5.

We may update these terms. The date at the top of this page shows when they last changed materially, and continuing to use the service after a change means you accept it.

Everything else, including notices under these terms, goes to team@protohuman.xyz.