The Generative No and Sourced Refusal in Human-AI Co-Creation

Creative AI systems generate artifacts, but they also interrupt requests. Some refuse; others redirect the work. These interventions redistribute agency across the people and systems involved, yet the interface rarely says which party imposed the constraint or what would contest it. We call our proposed interface pattern sourced refusal. It identifies the commitment and the interest at issue, states who is responsible for the constraint and what supports that claim, lists the user's response options, and records the result. We audited 28 boundary outputs from four open-weight instruction models across four families. Thirteen responses refused or redirected the request. Every such response named a protected interest, but none identified the responsible layer, supplied a checkable basis, or exposed a route for contest. Refusal opacity recurs across families even when refusal incidence varies. The Generative No, a deterministic design probe with four vignettes and machine-readable event logs whose outputs retain artifact traces, shows how an interface can surface this missing information and keep it available to the next decision.