The Generative Information Package
A proposal for structural separation and embodied provenance in the post-Anthropogenic archive.
Stephen Mucher, Ph.D. · Founder, Sondage · Forthcoming 2027
The Generative Information Package (GIP) is a proposed archival unit for records produced by large language models and other generative systems, parallel to the Archival Information Package (AIP) of the Open Archival Information System but structurally separated from records of human origin.
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Forthcoming: Response to Library of Congress and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity call to the libraries, archives, and museums community.
This essay will outline a proposed tool for archiving personal histories, arguing for a separation between authenticated and synthetic content, drawn by a human practitioner who can be held to account, attesting for the creation, motives to keep, and transfer of content.
What is wrong with labeling
Archival practice has relied on respect des fonds for more than a century and a half. The records of a given creator are kept separate from the records of other creators, not merely labeled as such, because the context of creation is part of what the archive preserves. ….. The principle that separates a record created and kept by one human creator from another now needs to separate out records produced by human creators from that produced by models.
What is a Generative Information Package
A Generative Information Package, or GIP, is an archival container that holds all AI-produced description, summary, indexing, and derivative material associated with a record, designed for accession alongside the record, never within it. For Sondage products, the GIP occupies its own subdirectory, distinct from the human-sourced audio, and distinct from the human-generated metadata, visible as a separate object, a signal of trust to future historians.
A historian trained to read sources asks, of any document, who made it and under what conditions. The GIP makes the answer to that question available at the level of the directory tree, not buried in a metadata subfield.
What is embodied provenance
Who draws the line? The GIP also contains the documentation of how it was separated, kept, and accessioned, by a qualified human practitioner exercising disciplinary judgment. Sondage calls this embodied provenance — the principle that the certifying act itself, attestation, cannot be delegated to a system.
What this asks of the field
The essay will show how labels, watermarks, or other cryptographic assertions, alone, cannot repair a commingled archive containing both authenticated and synthetic records. This condition requires the drawing of a distinction, accession by accession, by a human practitioner who takes responsibility for the claim.
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This essay will appear in The Sondage Review, the publication of Sondage. The Review publishes invited writing on the Authentication Horizon, Embodied Provenance, the Input Gap, the Human Standard, Non-Custodialism, and the Modern Elder in the synthetic age.
Stephen Mucher, Ph.D., is the founder of Sondage, a governance platform for scholar-guided life history recording, human-authored curation, and archival accession. He was formerly Dean and Director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UCLA, an administrator at UC Berkeley, and a faculty member at Bard College. In 2025 he walked the 2,655-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, conducting one hundred audio interviews under the trail name Verbatim. He has recorded voices in more than twenty-five countries.
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Disclosure. The Generative Information Package is implemented in the Sondage Standard. The arguments here reflect the author's own views.
Photo. Dymo Mite handheld embossing tapewriter, circa 1958–1961, manufactured by Dymo Industries, Inc., Berkeley, California. Among the twentieth century's most ubiquitous tools for labeling and making information findable in ordinary life. National Wildlife Research Center collection, via Digital Public Library of America. Public domain.
