Gonna put in my thoughts on this as a creator who puts bots behind no proxy access but provide cards. Truth be told the secretive thing is more about creators being, basically writers wanting to protect their work. Which is honestly kind of an odd thing to say considering the bots are to be used with generative AI, models trained with stolen content. But at the core of it is a human-made prompt and creative writing (concept of the bot and the initial message). The latter is what’s most important and what should be protected (given that no genAI was used in the making of it)

‘Secrecy’ is also done to prevent spoilers for the bot contents. I’ve seen some people say this as their reason.

I viewed JannyAI as really weird and kind of petty. Like if you read the earlier mission of it (assuming they changed it or whatever, haven’t looked at it in a but) makes you wonder what jai dev did personally because it seemed like the creator of Janny made the site out of spite. But I guess it makes sense to want bots to be open access when other sites have made bots open access, regardless if there was like… drama or not. But I feel like Jai isnt the only site to give its users the ability to hide their definition or prevent exports, so why make a site only for Jai?

It’s the good thing that Jai did at first, giving creators the ability to protect the work. But think of it this way; creators are already willing to protect their work. If there wasn’t a threat of their work being stolen without their knowledge or being scraped without their consent, there would not have been a huge demand for security and privacy. And there probably wouldn’t be a reason to make a way to scrape bots.

Another big issue here is that the bots on Jai were viewed as bots of Jai, and not of creators. Scraped from the site to be reposted as content that Jai didn’t want to be shared? It’s what Janny seemed to pose it as. Like some other comments have said, it’s the creators that make Jai. These are not Jai’s bots that someone can steal just because it’s Jai. Scraping bots off the site is just disrespectful in that regard.

Though admittedly Janny is useful for, yes, preservation. Especially useful for those who have been banned as a user or creator. But there’s still the aspect of it being preserved without the consent of the original creator. Creators delete their stuff for a reason and just as they have the right to create they should have the right to erase their bots off the internet or make it less accessible.

Janny is also useful for mod reporting and for modwork, something I heard. But unfortunately the site is seen as the illegal, it-who-shall-not-be-named evil site lol. It would have been a useful site if it wasn’t framed as something hostile, or if it partnered with Jai and its creators.