Content and safety

What Quillow will write, and what it will not.

This is a product for small children, so the rules come first and they are written in plain words. If you want the legal version it is in the privacy policy and the terms, which say the same things at greater length.

Always gentle

Mild peril at most, resolved warmly by the last page. A lost mitten, a shy first day, a storm at sea in a friendly boat, a dragon who turns out to be lonely. Sadness that resolves is allowed, because it is in every good children's book.

Never frightening at bedtime

No violence, no weapons, no cruelty, no horror, no death played for fear, nothing sexual, no drugs, no hate, and no real-world tragedy. No story ends on a scare.

Age-tuned, not just age-labelled

The 2 to 4 band gets short lines and strong rhythm. The 8 to 10 band gets paragraphs and a dry joke. The band changes what can happen in the story, not only how it is worded.

No moral tacked on the end

Children notice being lectured faster than adults do. The last page settles, it does not explain.

How the check works

Two passes, before a word is written.

Not after. A story that has already been written is harder to refuse honestly, and a parent watching a progress bar has already started hoping.

Pass one

A word list

Fast, free, and it catches the obvious. It is deliberately short. A list long enough to catch every unkind idea also refuses the brave little baker who fights a dragon, and a dragon in a cozy story is fine.

Pass two

A model reads it for tone

It sorts the idea into cozy, needs a gentler hand, or no, and explains itself in one sentence. Tone is not a keyword problem. A story where nobody comes to the birthday party contains no banned word and still is not a bedtime story.

What a refusal sounds like

“That one is a little too big for a Quillow book. Every story here stays cozy, so nothing frightening, nothing unkind, and nothing that ends on a scare. Try an adventure instead: something lost and found, a small brave thing, a friend made in an unlikely place.”

It never repeats the idea back, never implies anything about the person who typed it, and always offers the next move. Ruth reads every refusal the system sends and rewrites the ones that sound cold.

Pictures

Illustration only, from words only.

There is no photo upload in Quillow and nowhere to put one. Illustrations are painted in a house style that is deliberately not photorealistic, from a short text description you choose from chips.

This is a product decision, not a limitation we are working around. A pipeline that generates photorealistic images of real children is a different product with different risks, and we do not want to be near it.

What we never collect

  • Photographs of your child, or of anyone
  • Last names, dates of birth, or school names
  • Location beyond the shipping address on a print order
  • Advertising identifiers, third party trackers, or data sold to anyone

Tell us when we get it wrong

If a book came out with something in it that should not have been, we want to know that evening. Write to help@getquillow.com with the book title. If an idea was refused and you think it should not have been, send us that too. Both go to a person, and both change the rules when they should.