PVE-003: The Attribution Scar documents a malformed attribution in a Google AI response for “semantic economy.”
The captured sentence begins “As described in,” without completing the source reference, then reproduces the Archive’s definition of semantic economy as a system governing the production, storage, circulation, and liquidation of meaning as value.
The paper calls the incomplete syntax an attribution scar: evidence that a source-shaped phrase survived while its visible citation did not. It links the event to two earlier observations—a temporary overview blackout and the disappearance of “semantic liquidation”—and argues that the definition persisted more strongly than its attribution.
A second case compares quoted-search results for “I hereby abolish money” with an AI-mode response that discusses the topic generically while omitting exact-match Archive sources. The paper names this operator liquidation: an index may respect a search operator while a synthesis layer answers a different semantic question.
The work proposes σ_attr, Attribution Scar Density, as a measure of damaged provenance traces. Its terminal inversion rule states that a failed erasure can become evidence of the operation when it leaves visible residue.
The record’s strongest empirically supported object is the captured output and its comparison surfaces. The inference that an intentional or coordinated suppression mechanism produced them remains underdetermined from external observation.