Pith Number

pith:LUAIHHRS

pith:2026:LUAIHHRS3OG5AEMNMMPXBUWEA2

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Mecha-nudges for Machines

Giulio Frey, Kawin Ethayarajh

Sellers on Etsy began including more information useful to AI agents after ChatGPT launched.

arxiv:2603.23433 v2 · 2026-03-24 · cs.AI

Open paper page JSON Open Graph Bundle Merged state Verified badge What is a Pith Number?

Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{LUAIHHRS3OG5AEMNMMPXBUWEA2}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

After ChatGPT's release, listings contain significantly more machine-usable information for predicting agent curation decisions, increasing by 0.143 bits out of a maximum possible increase of 0.355. This shift is robust across prompts, token choices, labeling models, and fine-tuning architectures; absent in a regulated-text placebo; and far larger than the effect of generic LLM rewriting.

C2weakest assumption

The observed increase in machine-usable information is attributable to systematic changes aimed at influencing AI agents rather than to unrelated trends in listing quality, seller behavior, or platform algorithms that happened to coincide with ChatGPT's release.

C3one line summary

Etsy listings increased machine-usable information by 0.143 bits after ChatGPT while human-usable information stayed flat, offering the first large-scale evidence of mecha-nudging in the wild.

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:00:36.978486Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

5d00839e32db8dd0118d631f70d2c406a1841264f10cff2b38350a51a262bd82

Aliases

arxiv: 2603.23433 · arxiv_version: 2603.23433v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2603.23433 · pith_short_12: LUAIHHRS3OG5 · pith_short_16: LUAIHHRS3OG5AEMN · pith_short_8: LUAIHHRS

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/LUAIHHRS3OG5AEMNMMPXBUWEA2 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 5d00839e32db8dd0118d631f70d2c406a1841264f10cff2b38350a51a262bd82

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "d692c9fe0b1d8a7b1efa4c2189cc1a006daf19935fe0b16d378828af6e25e765",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.AI",
    "submitted_at": "2026-03-24T17:02:21Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "483ecec61f63a9605d86d0296a9ba3615981492ec221c3309c5bb6520fc2d864"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2603.23433",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}