Coined, 2026
Novelty Illusion
The Novelty Illusion is the gap between how new a claim feels to a person and how new it reads to a machine.
"Without a new concept, even real new data feels like new information to a person but reads as the same content to a machine, because its cosine similarity to existing content is almost perfect."
A bigger percentage, a precise domain count, a reworded claim: to a reader each one looks like new proof. To an embedding model the sentences are near-identical vectors. If the edit adds no net new concept, nothing changed that a machine can see.
The mistake is the Novelty Illusion. The mechanism behind it is Cosine Camouflage: the reason a machine reads the same content anyway.