Auditable AI-Assisted Research Writing: An Engineering Discipline with Pre-Registered Process Observation

2026-08-11

AI Summary

Current AI-assisted scientific writing lacks auditable generation processes and mechanisms for accountability, undermining the verifiability of research credibility and compliance. This work proposes a novel auditing paradigm embedded directly within the production workflow, enforcing end-to-end traceability, immutability, and third-party reproducibility of AI involvement through preregistered blind-spot indicator cards, sealed execution environments, and automated gatekeeping intercepts. Core technical components include Git-sealed lineage anchoring, hash-bound provenance tracking, red-flag interception protocols, cross-model role isolation, and programmatic assembly. In experimental validation, one project was automatically terminated when preregistered confirmatory tests triggered a No-Go decision. An open-source toolkit is released to enable independent recomputation of all core audit metrics by third parties.

Abstract

Language models now draft, classify and criticise inside research production, yet the artifacts they help produce carry little accountable history. Rather than detecting machine involvement afterwards, we specify an auditability discipline built at production time: git sealing with an anchor lineage, hash-bound provenance, red-line gates that refuse non-compliant artifacts and log every refusal, cross-model role separation, and programmatic assembly from registered sources. Adherence is instrumented by metric cards, each carrying a pre-registered blind spot and evidential standing, frozen before the prospective case it observes. In that case the observed project's pre-registered confirmatory test was executed under seal and returned No-Go, and that project's frozen stopping rule halted the work, against its own operators. A lower-graded retrospective case covers families whose machinery predates the protocol. Current observations are provisional; we release a package from which a third party can recompute every primary metric.

Problem

• Auditable AI
• Research Writing
• Provenance
• AI Accountability
• Scientific Integrity

Innovation

• auditable AI
• pre-registered process
• hash-bound provenance
• metric cards
• red-line gates