Provenance Erasure · how attribution dies in the composition layer
Provenance Erasure and Supply-Side Composition in Generative Answer Engines — a reception-capture method, and its first paired results across a repository-severance event.
Two measures, kept apart. Attribution presence per query fell from 10/11 scorable outputs to 6/12. Conditional provenance erasure, the unattributed reproductions among outputs that reproduce framework-specific content, rose from 1/11 to 2/8.
Across a severance. Between the two captures the platform hosting the corpus's certifying identifiers terminated the depositing account. Queries whose June attribution resolved through since-deleted records lost attribution at 3/6, against 1/4 in the unaffected stratum: a severance-associated attribution-loss differential of +0.25, consistent with repository removal as the operative mechanism; the paired observational design cannot exclude concurrent system changes.
Where the loss lies. Concept-grade content persists through residual metadata, while specification-grade, computable content ceased to render in the observed outputs. The deepest cost of repository deletion is in the operative stratum: retrievable, computable instruments.
Stands beside The Three Dimensions of Provenance Erasure (#1469) and the Sophistry Measure · the captures it reads are in the Capture Registry · CC BY 4.0 · the record · ∮ = 1