The Framework
Preservative AI is operationalised through four instruments: principles that direct the work, refusals that bound it, lenses that interrogate content, and diagnostics that interrogate grammar.
The architecture
The four instruments answer four different questions about any communication under audit:
| Instrument | Question it answers | Count | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Principles | What should the practice do? | 5 | Five Operational Principles |
| Refusals | What will the practice never do? | 5 | Five Refusals |
| Lenses | What is missing from the content — and, via Lens 8, from the audit itself? | 8 | The Epistemic Lenses |
| Diagnostics | What is the grammar doing? | 4 | Suffixscape |
Principles and refusals are commitments — they bind the auditor. Lenses and diagnostics are instruments — they examine the audited material. The pairing is deliberate: a methodology that audits others for accountability publishes its own constraints first, in machine-readable form.
The five operational principles (summary)
- Preserve sources; never replace them — always link to canonical originals; AI audits, it does not substitute.
- Audit framing; do not amplify it — analyse how a story is constructed, not just restate its claims.
- Surface omissions, not repetitions — highlight what was left out and whose voices were absent.
- Structurally include marginalised voices — multi-lens frameworks as architecture, not add-ons.
- Publish the method openly — vocabularies, prompts, and scores machine-readable for independent audit.
Full treatment of each principle →
The five refusals (summary)
No synthetic quotes or impersonation; no invented events, claims, or sources; no training on private or unconsented data; no engagement optimisation at the expense of completeness; no adversarial positioning against specific AI companies. Why each refusal is load-bearing →
The eight epistemic lenses (summary)
Derived from GoldBerry's ACST adaptation and applicable to any public communication, each lens asks a distinct question about absence — from whose embodied, relational knowledge is missing to who is not at the table. The eighth, Trickster Knowledge, is reflexive: it audits the framework's own analysis for solemn closure, not just the source. Each lens produces findings, gaps, evidence, and a justified 0–100 score. The full lens framework →
Suffixscape (summary)
Four linguistic diagnostics — nominalised evasion, agency diffusion, epistemic inflation, and temporal flatness — that read grammar as an accountability record. The full diagnostics, with a live demo →
How the instruments compose in an audit
- Anchor: preserve the source link and capture the original verbatim (Principle 1).
- Frame: analyse how the headline and structure construct the issue (Principle 2).
- Lens pass: run all eight lenses; record findings, gaps, evidence, scores (Principles 3–4). Lens 8 runs last, against the source and the draft audit — a non-empty self-audit sends the composite back for tone revision.
- Grammar pass: run Suffixscape diagnostics on the language itself.
- Publish: release the audit with method, scores, and version history (Principle 5) — within the bounds set by the five refusals throughout.
This sequence appears as a ready-to-use prompt in The Practice, and can be tried immediately on the Tools page.