RDWP-13 – The Medium Shapes the Mind: Language Under Drift

This paper develops semantic drift, where language loses nuance through over-optimization and repetition. It builds on mediated realness (the gap between representation and performance) and shows how words become simulacra in the Baudrillardian sense of hyperreality. In the age of AI-generated text, semantic drift is the linguistic counterpart to filter fatigue: fluent, abundant, but hollow.

1. The Medium Shapes the Mind: How Drift
Hollowed Out Language and Culture
Why every new wave of media leaves us talking faster, thinking shallower, and feeling le
real.
AUG 29, 2025
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This essay is Part 4 in my ongoing series on “Semantic Drift”, where I explore how AI resha
language, meaning, and culture.
REALITY DRIFT

2. The evolution of media as extensions of the mind from television to smartphones to
AI.
Marshall McLuhan once said: the medium is the message.
In 2025, the medium is no longer television or print. The medium is language itself:
recomposed, recycled, and optimized through AI.
That means the medium is not just the message. The medium is the mind.
When linguists talk about “semantic drift,” they mean the slow evolution of words o
centuries. Silly once meant “innocent.” Awful once meant “worthy of awe.” Languag
bends with time.
But AI has accelerated this drift from centuries to seconds.
Ask a language model to paraphrase a sentence ten times in a row and you’ll watch
meaning quietly hollow out. “I think, therefore I am” becomes “Having a plan is as
important as execution.” The surface looks fine. The philosophy is gone.
That’s semantic drift in the age of machines. Not hallucination. Not error. A subtler
collapse of fidelity.
We test AI outputs for two things:
Accuracy: are the facts right?
Coherence: are the sentences grammatical?
But there’s a third axis we’ve ignored:
Drift Isn’t Just a Linguistic Quirk
Fidelity: The Missing Benchmark

3. Fidelity: does the meaning survive?
Without fidelity, intelligence becomes an empty exercise in form. Text looks smart,
the purpose that once gave it life has been sanded away.
Why does this matter outside of AI research? Because the medium isn’t neutral. Th
medium is the mind.
If AI systems are trained on outputs already thinned of meaning, the collapse
compounds. Accuracy may remain. Grammar may remain. But trust, nuance, and
intent bleed out.
This isn’t just a technical failure mode. It’s a cultural one. The same dynamics that
flatten AI outputs are also flattening our discourse:
Corporate emails optimized into jargon until no one knows what’s being said.
Social feeds optimized for engagement until clarity disappears.
News headlines compressed into outrage until meaning is lost in noise.
AI is simply mirroring the drift already underway.
In the 1990s, spam email didn’t threaten cognition. It was just noise.
But semantic drift in 2025 does. Because the “noise” is indistinguishable from the
medium of thought itself: language.
If we build superintelligence in an informational wasteland, a world where words n
longer hold, trust has evaporated, and meaning collapses — then what exactly have
built it into?
Culture in a Feedback Loop
Why It Matters Now

4. We may get smarter machines. But they may inherit a void.
If the medium is the mind, then fidelity isn’t just a technical metric. It’s a cultural
safeguard.
Accuracy keeps facts intact. Coherence keeps text readable. Fidelity keeps meaning
alive.
That’s what’s at stake: not just smarter systems, but a future where intelligence and
culture still share a common language.
I write about how modern systems bend our
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Further Resources:
[Semantic Drift Fidelity Benchmark Full Documentation] - Zenodo
[Semantic Drift Fidelity Benchmark Research Notes] - Figshare
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