Nothing here is a summary written after the fact. These are the problem, mechanism,
and move of each article, in the reading order, joined by its own connective lines.
Any one of them opens into the full argument.
Start where the damage is, in our own corpus, with the joins that every check passed over and the audit that got the size of it wrong by a factor of five.
Corpora built by machine at scale carry defects no check can see, because a document made of two unrelated research results is well formed at every level except meaning.
Mechanism
A concatenation of two unrelated documents passes every structural check there is, so the only instrument that detects it is a reader who knows what both halves were supposed to be about, and assembly at machine scale is the condition under which no such reader exists.
Move
Validate at the joins rather than at the file, and ask of any automated damage estimate what faculty it is exercising, because a count produced by the same kind of process that produced the damage inherits its blindness.
Damage found late is expensive, so the next move is upstream, to what a corpus does with machine-written material at the moment it arrives.
Machine-written material is indistinguishable in form from everything around it, so a corpus that admits it on equal terms loses the ability to say later which sentences it wrote itself.
Mechanism
Marking at birth puts the burden of proof on the material rather than on whoever later doubts it, and a rung that can only be climbed by a named human act cannot be climbed by an accumulation of passing checks.
Move
Quarantine machine-written work by default, make each promotion a signature, and keep demotion a repair job rather than a task handed back to the automation that promoted it.
Marking what you keep raises the harder question of what you can prove you no longer hold.
A system that must prove what it did keeps an append-only history, and a person described inside that history has a legal right to have their part erased, so the ledger and the right appear to rule each other out.
Mechanism
Erasure operates on the key rather than on the history, so destroying the key leaves the sequence, the hashes, and the replayability intact while the personal content inside becomes unrecoverable.
Move
Hold personal content under a per-person key stored somewhere else, and state the caveat as loudly as the capability, because the guarantee is exactly as strong as the key management underneath it.
That erasure works only because the history stays replayable, which is the property the next room takes apart and asks what it actually costs to keep.
Regulators and wounded people ask why a system decided what it decided, and the standard answer is an account produced after the fact by the same system, which is a story about the decision rather than the decision itself.
Mechanism
An explanation is generated after the event and can be checked against nothing, while a reconstruction is a rerun that can come out different, so only the second one is capable of failing and therefore only the second one is evidence.
Move
Record the whole envelope at the moment of inference, versions, artifact hashes, environment, seeds, and every time-dependent source, then declare in advance which grade of replay the system can honour.
End at the smallest unit of the same discipline, one sentence written beside a decision so the next hand has to argue with it rather than delete it.
A load-bearing decision recorded with only its rationale is still deleted by the next hand, because a reason explains a past choice to somebody who is making a future one.
Mechanism
A removal condition turns a decision into a testable claim about the present, so taking it out means arguing with a sentence instead of deleting a line.
Move
Beside every load-bearing decision write the condition under which its removal becomes safe, and treat the absence of that sentence as an unfinished record rather than a tidy one.
You have walked Provenance at machine scale end to end, from a corpus that could not see its own bad joins to a decision that can still say what would have to be true before it goes. None of it required knowing more than the people who built the thing. It required writing down what they already knew, at the moment they knew it.