"Nobody Did This"

Collaborative knowledge work rests on an implicit social contract: people who work together maintain a shared, informal/formal 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. By itself, however, such documentation cannot ensure accountability, since accountability also depends on contributors making recognizable judgments that others can interpret, question, and evaluate.

LLM agents shift this. People now co-think with agents, developing reasoning in dialogue rather than externalizing already-formed ideas. The boundary between what the individual contributed and what the agent introduced is never drawn. Documentation cannot recover what the process never produced.

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 blur and break down.