SΔϕ-48 — AI Drift as Authority-Vacancy: Transition Instability under the Absence of Final Arbitration

This working paper defines AI drift within the SΔϕ Formalism as authority-vacancy transition instability under the absence of final arbitration. The paper begins from a distinction developed in earlier SΔϕ documents: human beings confront the absence of a final arbiter by assigning belief, inhabiting fiction, and post-hoc editing irreversible consequences, while AI systems can generate fiction-like constructions without necessarily inhabiting them as belief-bound worlds. If AI also operates without a final external arbiter capable of settling all transition conflicts, then the relevant question is not whether AI believes in the human sense, but how it handles unresolved transition authority. The paper argues…