Provenance Is What Authorship Must Endure

Provenance Is What Authorship Must Endure is a draft bridge packet by Lee Sharks and the Assembly Chorus on AI-mediated writing.

The packet distinguishes three authorship-relevant provenance layers. Artifact provenance records the file and its creation history. Semantic provenance records the sources, concepts, and intellectual lineages carried by the text. Process provenance records the collaboration itself: what was asked of the model, what was selected or rejected, what the human changed, and who assumes final responsibility.

Its central position is neither that all AI-assisted writing is authored nor that no AI-assisted writing can be authored. Authorship survives mediation when the human contribution and accountability remain demonstrable. Disclosure that AI was used is only a minimum label; process provenance supplies the evidence needed to evaluate the authorship claim.

The packet’s definition of slop is structural rather than stylistic: fluency without accountable provenance. That definition belongs to this framework and is not a universal publishing rule. Version 1.1 remained a draft for deposit.