Fieldlight Institute

Human Subjects Research / Working Method 01

Governed
Human–AI
Archive
Acquisition

What would it mean to compensate people for longitudinal AI archives without turning private life into inventory?

Two boundaries organize the entire method.

01 / Identity boundary Anonymous by default. A participant becomes known only by explicit choice.
02 / Access boundary No human reads the transcripts. Not for valuation, troubleshooting, selection, or research.
Working proposal 0.1Not yet recruiting

Identity-Blind Research Architecture

The person and the corpus travel on separate rails.

Payment administration may need a legal identity. Research does not. The join between those systems is governed, minimal, and unavailable to analysis.

The Acquired Unit

A license.
A custody relationship.
Not the person.

The archive may enter research. The participant does not become inventory.

Payment recognizes structural depth, continuity, completeness, and the participant’s labor. It does not purchase a life, reward exposure, or convert possession into unlimited authority.

Archive Components

The export is not one undifferentiated object.

Conversation, agentic work, and the files those systems touched carry different risks and different evidentiary value. They stay separately declared, hashed, valued, and permissioned.

01 / Account export

Conversation

Messages, projects, account state, attachments, generated media, and provider metadata where available.

Eligible source component
02 / Operational supplement

Coding harness

Tasks, tools, terminal traces, permissions, plans, patches, commits, artifacts, errors, retries, and delegated work.

Eligible source component
03 / Separate source class

Workspace

Repositories, local documents, source code, and referenced files do not enter merely because a harness touched them.

Requires separate authority
conversation_export_only coding_harness_only combined_human_ai_archive

Product requirement: account holders should be able to export conversational history with or without coding-harness records. Until that boundary is documented and selectable, the harness remains a separately preserved supplement.

Compensation Instrument

Pay for structure.
Never for exposure.

The rubric is visible before substantive interpretation. Intimacy, trauma, sex, health, politics, or emotional intensity do not raise the price.

0–4Temporal spanDuration represented
0–4VolumeConversation + message density
0–3BreadthProjects, functions, modalities
0–4Longitudinal depthRecurrence, revision, continuity
0–3CompletenessIntegrity, metadata, attachments
0–2Context laborOrientation, glossary, chronology
20possible points
Snapshot$200Short period / isolated use
Developed$500Recurring subjects / 6–18 months
Longitudinal$900Multi-year or deeply iterative
Reference corpus$1,500Dense / multimodal / complete
Exceptional≤ $2,500Rare completeness + context labor
$50 preflight, paid whether selected or not$75–$100/hour for contextual sessionsNew public uses require new terms

Permission Is Multidimensional

One file.
Twelve decisions.

Possession authorizes nothing by itself. Each operation remains a named grant or a named refusal.

  1. 01Custody + preservation
  2. 02Content inspection
  3. 03Analysis + inference
  4. 04Indexing + embedding
  5. 05Combination
  6. 06Quotation
  7. 07Publication
  8. 08Public derivatives
  9. 09Model training
  10. 10Evaluation
  11. 11Transfer + resale
  12. 12Retention + exit
Consent to preserve is not consent to process.

The Acquisition Passage

Authority is named at every threshold.

  1. 01Invitation

    Purpose, possible use, pay, security, and choices arrive first.

  2. 02Participant export

    The participant keeps account control and chooses source components.

  3. 03Preflight

    Structure and integrity are inventoried without transcript reading.

  4. 04Offer + grant

    The score, compensation, permissions, and prohibitions become visible.

  5. 05Secure accession

    The source stays unchanged; any working copy receives separate governance.

  6. 06Bounded computation

    Only named systems, operations, outputs, purposes, and periods apply.

  7. 07Participant record

    Custody, actions, derivatives, corrections, and active grants remain inspectable.

  8. 08Closeout

    Every source, copy, index, finding, and unresolved derivative is accounted for.

Evidence Architecture

Three layers.
No silent passage.

01 / RestrictedPreserved source

Original package, manifests, hashes, source-specific permission, and completeness record.

02 / GovernedResearch derivatives

Inventories, normalization, indexes, embeddings, analysis, and annotations under named authority.

03 / AuthorizedPublic derivatives

Participant-selected excerpts, aggregate findings, methods, diagrams, and publications.

Research authority does not become publication authority. Public authority does not flow backward into the source.

Proposed First Pilot

Six archives.
Different depths.
One governed test.

≈ 6 archives$3.5k–$5k participant payment budget0 human transcript readers

What the pilot must learn

  • Does the structural score predict research utility?
  • When does harness data materially change the account?
  • Do participants understand and use granular permission?
  • Can negative permission survive derived systems?
  • What context improves interpretation without exposing identity?

Working proposal 0.1 / technical, legal, security, and ethics design remain open / not yet recruiting

Institutional Lineage

The rights become a research method.

Constitutional authorityParticipant Charter 0.4

Names the participant’s rights across the research relationship.

 Negative permissionThe Right Not To Be Processed

Separates custody from computation.

 Execution modelNegative Permission State Model

Makes refusals explicit, granular, inheritable, and enforceable.

 Institutional relationshipHuman Research Utility

Defines custody, grants, compensation, and durable closeout.