ContentRoofLab

What's new

Arabic stories keep their pictures

The safeguard that keeps prophets out of pictures now reads Arabic and Urdu word by word. It stops fewer stories by mistake, and every real refusal still holds.

ContentRoof never makes a picture of any prophet, of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, his family or Companions, of angels or of God. In a story about a prophet, its pictures show no people at all. A check in code reads every picture's description and the script before a picture is made, and refuses anything that could break this rule. That rule has not changed.

What went wrong. Arabic letters join, and the check looked for its words inside other words. العمر, "age", contains the letters of the name عمر. أجنبي, "foreign", contains نبي, "prophet". A story about Ibn Battuta's journey to Mecca gives the traveller's age, so the check decided the whole story was about a prophet and refused every one of its pictures.

What changed. The check now reads whole words, still allowing the letters Arabic attaches at the front (للنبي, بالنبي, وعمر), the article on sacred words, and their endings. حضور is treated as a title of the Prophet ﷺ only in Urdu; in Arabic it means "presence".

How we checked it. We ran the old and new check over 7,707 texts. 18 answers changed, and all 18 were false alarms: texts that should never have been stopped. No text is newly refused, and every real refusal still holds. A set of 45 test cases, including every kind of refusal, runs before each change to this check.

If a story of yours lost its pictures, make it again and its pictures will be made.

Make a cinematic story →

  1. Exports carry on while ContentRoof updates
  2. 3D Simulations: a new camera angle on every moment
  3. Cinematic stories: every shot moves in its first second
  4. More than 300 explainer animations, picked by what each sentence says