We have become a provenance culture, and I count myself an enforcer of it. Galleries now label machine-made images. Legislatures draft watermark bills, publishers add disclosure lines to copyright pages, and coders audit the licenses of every scraped repository. I am a plaintiff in litigation over the corpora used to train commercial language machines, so my commitment to the chain of custody is on file in federal court. The question a serious reader asks of any artifact in 2026 is blunt: who made this, from what, and who touched it on the way to me? That question is healthy. It is also, in one enormous and telling case, suspended.

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