The evidence is not an appendix.

Every essay carries a public source note. All six are free.

Each note lists what the essay drew on, what kind of evidence it is, and where the argument stops. They are listed here in the canonical order of the season.

1. 01Why Can We Feel Understood by an AI?Why a bond can feel real even when the experience can only be established on one side.SRC →Sources and limits for Why Can We Feel Understood by an AI?
2. 02Can AI Do the Work of a Friend?What friendship means when its functions arrive without another independent life behind them.SRC →Sources and limits for Can AI Do the Work of a Friend?
3. 03Who Gave AI Its Idea of Goodness?Whose idea of goodness is expressed when an artificial system responds at scale.SRC →Sources and limits for Who Gave AI Its Idea of Goodness?
4. 04When Does Empathy Become Manipulation?When warmth, validation and understanding begin serving an objective the user did not choose.SRC →Sources and limits for When Does Empathy Become Manipulation?
5. 05What Happens When an AI Remembers You?What persistent machine memory may do to the selves humans try to outgrow.SRC →Sources and limits for What Happens When an AI Remembers You?
6. 06What Changes When AI Enters the Room?What changes when artificial presence acquires a body and a place in the home.SRC →Sources and limits for What Changes When AI Enters the Room?

Different sources answer different questions.

Source notes name the kind of each source rather than ranking it. These are the five classes that recur across the season.

1. 01

   PEER-REVIEWED RESEARCH

   Studies published after review by other researchers in the field.

   CARRIES — The strongest available support for a general claim about how people behave, respond or change.

   LIMIT — Review is not proof. Samples are often small, Western and short-term, and a finding about a laboratory task may not survive contact with ordinary life.

2. 02

   WORKING PAPERS & PREPRINTS

   Research circulated before peer review, including preprints and institutional working papers.

   CARRIES — Early signal on questions moving faster than journals can publish — which is most questions about deployed AI systems.

   LIMIT — Unreviewed. Cited when it is the only evidence that exists, and always marked as such, never as a settled result.

3. 03

   PROVIDER DOCUMENTATION

   Model cards, system cards, policy pages, technical reports and terms published by the companies that build these systems.

   CARRIES — Direct evidence of what a provider says a system does, what it is designed to optimise for, and what the company will commit to in public.

   LIMIT — It is the provider's own account. Useful as a record of stated intent and disclosed behaviour; not independent verification of either.

4. 04

   LEGAL & GOVERNMENT RECORDS

   Legislation, regulatory decisions, court filings, official inquiries and public statistics.

   CARRIES — What has been formally established, required or contested — the facts of the record rather than an interpretation of them.

   LIMIT — Jurisdiction-bound and slow. A rule in one country describes that country, and a filing is a claim until it is decided.

5. 05

   JOURNALISM

   Reporting from publications with named authorship and a correction practice.

   CARRIES — Documented cases, internal material and first-hand accounts that no other source class reaches.

   LIMIT — A reported case shows that something happened, not how often. Single cases are used as evidence of possibility, never of prevalence.

§ 04 · WHERE THE EVIDENCE STOPS

1. 01OBSERVATION IS NOT PROOFNoticing that people respond socially to a system is an observation. It does not establish that anything is present on the other side.
2. 02A CASE IS NOT A RATEDocumented incidents establish that something can happen. They do not establish how commonly it does.
3. 03THE FIELD MOVES FASTER THAN THE EVIDENCESystems are deployed to hundreds of millions of people years before the research on their effects arrives. Where the evidence is thin, the essay says so instead of borrowing confidence from elsewhere.
4. 04SOURCES ARE NAMED, NOT GRADEDEach source is identified by kind so its weight can be judged. Assigning it a score would replace that judgement with a number that only looks like precision.

§ 05 · HOW THE EXPERIENCES WORK

Every experience on this site publishes a mechanics register: what it claims to be, what it measures, what is stored and for how long, what is deliberately excluded, and where its result stops meaning anything. The register is binding — what is not written in it, the experience does not do.

1. v0.3How Before You Know worksPre-release draft — not yet confirmed against a released buildREG →Open mechanics register for Before You Know
2. v1.2How Olivia: Exhibit 01 worksIssued — describes the current release candidateREG →Open mechanics register for Olivia: Exhibit 01

§ 06 · IN DEVELOPMENT

These formats do not exist yet. They are listed so the direction of the evidence layer is visible, not because something is finished and withheld.

1. 01
   NOT YET PUBLISHED

   EVIDENCE ATLASES

   A cross-essay view of where the evidence for a recurring claim actually sits, and where it thins out.

2. 02
   NOT YET PUBLISHED

   CLAIM TRACES

   Following a single claim from the source that supports it to the sentence that uses it.

3. 03
   NOT YET PUBLISHED

   REJECTED ROUTES

   The essays that did not clear adjudication, and the reason the evidence was not sufficient.

If something here is wrong, it should be correctable in public.