Provenance After AI: Semantic Provenance and the Provenance Erasure Rate is a theoretical paper by Lee Sharks, deposited 12 May 2026 at 31,361 characters.
It surveys the provenance discourse of 2025–2026 and finds it two-thirds complete: the field has substantially advanced two dimensions of the problem and has begun, but not finished, the third. That structure — crediting what exists before naming the gap — is what makes the paper a contribution to a discourse rather than a complaint about it.
The missing dimension is semantic provenance: not who made a file or whether bytes were altered, but whether meaning survives with its attribution through composition. PER — the provenance erasure rate — is the measurement the paper supplies, and it became the archive's central metric, with a canonical definition surface at provenanceerasure.org and a distributional companion in Erasure Skew.