"Nobody Did This"

Collaborative knowledge work rests on an implicit social contract: people who work together maintain a shared, informal record of who contributed what. We call this witnessed contribution — work that can be attributed, contested, and accounted for because it emerged in a social situation that made it intelligible to others.

Witnessed contribution is not the same as documented provenance. A provenance log records that something was produced and how. What makes a contribution attributable and accountable is that it was produced under conditions where others could recognize it as an act of judgment, respond to it, and hold the contributor answerable.

LLM agents shift this. Rather than externalizing already-formed ideas, people now co-think with agents: drafting, refining, and developing reasoning in dialogue. The boundary between what the individual contributed and what the agent introduced becomes hard to reconstruct after the fact — because it was never established during the process itself.

When agent-mediated work circulates between collaborators, neither sender nor recipient can reliably distinguish human contribution from agent reformulation. The shared understanding that makes collaboration productive begins to break down.