Source Defect Transfer

A grounded generator can faithfully reproduce promotional tone, dominant viewpoints, staleness, and other defects present in retrieved sources.

Retrieval constrains generation to evidence but does not make that evidence neutral, current, or representative. A well-cited output can inherit emotional language, promotional framing, stale facts, and dominant-viewpoint bias from its source set. Diverse questioning cannot recover perspectives absent from the search environment.

Treat source-set balance and post-retrieval content sifting as independent harness responsibilities. Audit them alongside entailment under grounding quality dimensions; citation presence alone cannot distinguish faithful grounding from faithful propagation of flawed source material.

---

Sources

• Shao et al. (2024), full paper, pp. 1–27