CONCEPT
The Provenance Problem
Philip K. Dick's insight formalized: knowledge of where something comes from and what it is made of changes the experience of the thing even when the thing itself is functionally indistinguishable from an authentic original—and AI-assisted creation has made provenance permanently unstable in every domain of intellectual production.
Provenance is the knowledge of origins. Philip K. Dick understood its significance through the metaphor of the electric sheep: a mechanical animal indistinguishable from a biological one in every observable feature, yet whose owner cannot relate to it the way he would relate to a real sheep, because the knowledge of its construction changes what the relationship means. The provenance problem extends Dick's metaphor into intellectual production: a paragraph written by a large language model may be more coherent, more elegantly structured, and more precisely referenced than a paragraph written by a human author working alone—yet the relationship between the author and the text, between the reader and the argument, is changed by the knowledge of how the text was produced. Provenance is not a property of the text; it is a property of the relationship between the text and those who know its history. Cut the relationship,
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