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NOTE 002

The evidence deficit

Why polished model output becomes operationally dangerous when provenance and acceptance boundaries disappear.

Fluency is not provenance

Generative systems make incomplete information look complete. The danger is not only fabrication; it is the loss of visible boundaries between supplied facts, retrieved evidence, assumptions and generated interpretation. A professional interface should make those boundaries harder to ignore.

Evidence has acceptance criteria

A document is not automatically evidence because it exists. Operators need to know who issued it, whether it is current, whether the relevant fields match the decision and whether policy permits reliance on it. For a supplier payment, an invoice, contract, ownership record, screening result and delegated approval each answer different questions.

Stop conditions matter

A controlled workflow declares what cannot be inferred. Missing ownership evidence should not become an invented ownership conclusion. A conflicting amount should not be averaged away. Where evidence is absent or inconsistent, the system should stop, expose the gap and assign it to a responsible person.

Practical implementation

Evidence-aware systems should preserve source references, timestamps, document versions and the transformation applied to each item. They should distinguish extracted values from model conclusions and allow a reviewer to reproduce the path from source to proposed action.