Drift is Everywhere
Drift is Everywhere.
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People rarely abandon their moral code in one dramatic act. They move the boundary a little at a time, rationalize the next decision, and eventually defend a state they once would have recognized as wrong. This is ethical drift—and a current provenance dispute shows exactly what happens when documented facts are sitting in plain sight.
I gave ChatGPT an external specification for how I write. It understood it, had followed it before, and then ignored it anyway. What happened next became an unexpectedly clean demonstration of AI drift, external correction, and why having a rule is not the same thing as enforcing it at execution.
Feelings matter. Perception matters. Belief matters. But none of them becomes truth simply because it is sincerely or intensely held. Whether in relationships, ideology, or AI governance, the same category error appears when internal experience is allowed to substitute for external reality. Truth may be difficult to determine. That does not make it subjective. Reality obeys structure, not narrative.