Metaphorical Drift

Metaphorical Drift is the hypothesized gradual attenuation of experiential richness in cultural metaphors caused by the recursive feedback loop between human-generated and AI-generated language. Humans produce language saturated with conceptual metaphors grounded in embodied experience. That language becomes training data. AI systems extract statistical patterns and produce new language replicating those patterns. The new language is read by humans who absorb its metaphorical structure. The absorbed metaphors shape subsequent human language production. The new human language, now partly shaped by AI-generated patterns, becomes training data for the next generation of AI systems. Each turn of the loop is a potential site of drift — a gradual shift in conceptual structures away from embodied grounding and toward statistical regularity. The drift may be undetectable in any single iteration but cumulative across thousands.