Beyond "Made with AI": Visualizing Provenance Density to Mitigate the Transparency Penalty

What the source reports

The reader side (2609.03460, "Beyond 'Made with AI': Visualizing Provenance Density"). Users can no longer use fluency as a proxy for truth - the "Fluency Trap" makes them trust fluent hallucinations and discount accurate content once disclosed as AI-generated (the transparency penalty). Binary authorship labels answer the wrong question. The paper's Provenance Density interface visualizes the density of verified claims in a text: with 81 participants it produced a large discernment gap between truth and fabrication (+4.15 points, d = 1.82), while participants with no signal showed no detectable discrimination. A 200-sample technical audit adds the sharp twist: retrieval density alone is insufficient - on dynamic queries, a Consistency Veto carries most of the discriminative signal. Transparency, the authors conclude, must move from authorship disclosure toward evidence visualization.