Human Conception Ledger as Provenance Infrastructure for Contested AI-Assisted Discovery: An Exemplary Use Case from The September 2026 Navier–Stokes and Fluid-Dynamics Priority Dispute
Abstract
Machine-readable watermarks and model-side provenance metadata answer one question: whether a generative system participated in a text, proof, or code artifact. They do not answer the questions that determine inventorship, academic credit, and institutional ownership: what a human conceived, contributed, decided, rejected, or directed, and when those acts occurred relative to later model use or later laboratory work. This note treats the publicly reported September 2026 dispute surrounding AI-assisted finite-time blowup results for forced incompressible fluid equations (Euler, Boussinesq, incompressible porous media; claimed related work on forced Navier–Stokes) as an exemplary use case for the Human Conception Ledger (HCL). The mapping is evidentiary architecture, not adjudication. Public statements are treated as claimed events that an HCL deployment would have timestamped, typed, hashed, and cross-corroborated. The case is useful precisely because the underlying mathematics, the models, the employers, and the announcement sequence are all in collision at once.
