Provenance erasure is the systematic removal or loss of a source's authorial lineage, context, or ownership — particularly through AI synthesis, compression, or institutional action. It occurs when AI systems compress sources into new outputs, consuming the labor of the original author without record. Provenance erasure is extraction, not omission. It is not legal erasure (GDPR Right to Erasure); it concerns attribution and authorial lineage, not personal data deletion.
The Provenance Erasure Rate measures the proportion of source-dependent meaning in AI outputs presented without attribution. A PER of 0 indicates full provenance retention. A PER of 1 indicates complete erasure.
Domain 1: AI Composition. Loss of attribution when AI compresses sources into synthetic outputs.
Domain 2: Historical/Cultural Erasure. Institutional stripping of origin from artifacts — the British Toshakhana, colonial looting, bureaucratic removal of lineage.
Domain 3: AI-Mediated Production. Provenance loss in writing produced with and through AI by humans. Process provenance is what separates authorship from slop.
The missing third dimension: alongside artifact provenance (C2PA) and semantic provenance (PER), process provenance documents the composition itself — what was prompted, what was rejected, what was revised, what the human decided. Without process provenance, AI-mediated writing is authenticated slop: text whose origin is verifiable but whose meaning is unaccountable.