Chapter 16: AI Alignment and the Fidelity Crisis | The Age of Drift – AI Alignment Explained

Описание: From the book: The Age of Drift: Why Modern Life Feels Fake — and What Reality Drift Reveals About the Modern Mind (2025)
by A. Jacobs
ISBN: 979-8276826493

Chapter 16: AI Alignment and the Fidelity Crisis examines the real failure mode of artificial intelligence. Not hallucination, not bias, and not existential takeover, but the slow collapse of Semantic Fidelity.
AI doesn’t just generate errors. It reshapes the environment where meaning forms.

The alignment problem is not whether AI is right. It’s whether meaning can survive under conditions of hyper-compression. In systems optimized for fluency, scale, and summarization, language becomes smoother while meaning becomes thinner.

This chapter explores the core Fidelity Crisis shaping modern AI systems:
• Semantic Drift
• Linguistic Compression
• Synthetic Fluency
• Cultural Recursion

As AI increasingly mediates how we write, reason, search, and explain, meaning begins to drift. Not through obvious failure, but through subtle erosion. You’ll hear why the real risk of AI isn’t future superintelligence, but present-day environmental change.

This chapter also explores:
– Why hallucinations are visible failures, but Semantic Drift is invisible
– How language can remain fluent while losing grounding
– Why AI trains on linguistic exhaust rather than meaning itself
– How recursive training loops accelerate cultural and cognitive drift
– Why alignment is as much a human problem as a technical one

Drawing on systems thinking, cognitive ecology, and compression theory, AI Alignment and the Fidelity Crisis traces how meaning thins when intelligence scales without constraint and why this may be the central alignment challenge of the 2020s and 2030s.

This is the structural core of AI Drift. And the deepest alignment problem we are already living inside.

Substack: https://therealitydrift.substack.com/
Github: https://github.com/therealitydrift/re...