From Authorship to Influence, The Trace Economy as a Public-Reliance Protocol.
Authors/Creators
Description
This paper introduces the Trace Economy as a public-reliance protocol for integrating authorship, provenance, and influence into a unified accountability framework. It argues that artificial intelligence has intensified, but not created, a broader institutional problem: people are increasingly asked to rely on outputs, claims, recommendations, rankings, reports, decisions, public narratives, and institutional representations without sufficient visibility over who created them, where they came from, or what interests shaped them.
The paper develops a three-pillar framework: authorship identifies the contributor; provenance traces the pathway; and influence reveals the forces. It argues that existing transparency mechanisms — including sponsored-search labels, product-placement disclosure, research funding declarations, conflict-of-interest statements, chain-of-custody procedures, and AI-content labelling — remain fragmented because they do not provide a general public-reliance protocol across domains.
The paper introduces influence provenance as the missing third layer of trace. It defines sponsored reasoning as the embedding of commercial, behavioural, institutional, or political influence inside AI-generated advice, recommendations, summaries, rankings, or decision-support outputs. It also introduces longitudinal cognitive data as a distinct category of user-derived data produced through repeated AI interaction, with implications for privacy, advertising, manipulation, authorship, cognitive sovereignty, and regulatory design.
The Trace Economy is presented as a low-friction public anchoring mechanism. When a work, claim, recommendation, decision, or output crosses from private cognition into public reliance, it can be marked through the protocol hashtags #TraceEconomy, #PoCW, and #Unifaircation, together with direct tagging of the architect or relevant foundation. The paper emphasises that the trace tag does not replace evidence; it anchors the claim and creates a public doorway into a deeper evidence trail.
The framework is applied across AI governance, social media harm reduction, grants and research, political campaign transparency, professional accountability, policing, public-sector decision-making, commercial recommendations, media, insurance, and war-justifying public claims. Its central doctrine is: private cognition remains private, public reliance becomes traceable, and influence becomes visible.
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From Authorship to Influence,The Trace Economy as a Public-Reliance Protocol.pdf
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Additional details
Related works
- Is supplement to
- Other: 10.5281/zenodo.19945554 5540749 (DOI)
- Other: 10.5281/zenodo.17454606582073 (DOI)
- Other: 10.5281/zenodo.169087815688128 (DOI)
- Other: 10.5281/zenodo.158469665081618 (DOI)
Dates
- Created
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2026-05-04A framework for making public reliance traceable by integrating authorship, provenance, and influence.
References
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