Provenance Theatre

trigger

"'LLM PROVENANCE NOTICE: This document was generated by Claude 3.5 Sonnet...' - boilerplate disclaimer blocks performing caution."

what it is

Standardized, lengthy disclaimer blocks or provenance notices that signal intellectual caution without addressing specific content quality. The LLM inserts formulaic warnings about its own limitations, unverified data, and potential biases as a header or footer block. The disclaimer performs rigour (we flagged the risk) without altering the substantive analysis that follows. A variant validates artifacts by citing their production history, agent identities, or distillation stages as authority signals rather than verifying the content.

what it signals

instead

Either verify the content (making the disclaimer unnecessary) or state the specific unverified claims. "The citations in section 3 have not been checked" is useful. "This was generated by an LLM" is obvious.

refs

• slopodar-sweep 2026-03-11: grok + gemini converged independently
• Bootcamp content, research reports (noopit) - LLM PROVENANCE NOTICE headers
• data/sweep/aggregate.yaml