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

arXiv:2609.03460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As generative AI makes polished prose cheap to produce, users can no longer rely on fluency as a proxy for truth.

We call this failure mode the Fluency Trap: users trust fluent hallucinations while also discounting accurate content once it is disclosed as AI-generated.

Binary ``Made with AI'' labels respond with authorship disclosure, but they do not show what supports a claim. We propose Provenance Density, an evidence-visualization interface that shows the density of verified claims in a text.

In a user study with 81 participants, an idealized Provenance Density interface produced a large discernment gap between truth and fabrication ($+4.15$ points, $d=1.82$), whereas participants given no signal showed no detectable discrimination.

A technical audit with 200 samples shows that retrieval density alone is insufficient; unexpectedly, the Consistency Veto carries most of the discriminative signal on dynamic queries. As AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from human writing, effective transparency must move from authorship disclosure toward evidence visualization.