Declaring the Invisible: The (IC) Button as a Behavioral Intervention for Transparent Human–AI Co-Creation

AbstractEvery day, millions of people use AI systems to write, think, and create — and conceal it. This concealment is not dishonesty: it is a rational response to a missing behavioral norm. We introduce the term Shame Gap (Reiner & Claude Sonnet 4.6, 2026) to name this structural discrepancy between AI use rates and declaration rates, sustained by the anticipatory aversive state that makes concealment the dominant behavioral strategy under conditions of norm ambiguity. Drawing on moral psychology, social norm theory, and the empirical literature on shame, identity formation, and the neurobiology of communicative silence, this paper introduces the (IC) Button — a single voluntary trigger embedded in AI interfaces that activates the Interlectic Copoiesis (IC) protocol and inverts the dominant incentive structure of AI concealment. We argue that the IC protocol — comprising four mandatory artifacts (Vector Note, Condensation Log, Intervention Marks, Emergence Log) culminating in a Zenodo-archived Bifurcation Card — transforms declaration into an instrumentally more valuable act than concealment. We position IC as the missing process-level implementation layer for a normative transparency infrastructure that has been codified without a practical activation mechanism. The paper raises four empirically tractable research questions and invites the behavioral science community to investigate the conditions under which a single interface element can function as the activation trigger for a full epistemological protocol.