Reality Drift

Although it kinda sounds like the name of a Californian synthwave band, 'Reality Drift' is a useful name for something that we've already seen happening recently:

Reality Drift describes a modern failure mode in which systems keep working even as they gradually lose alignment with real-world feedback and outcomes.

Across technology, institutions, media, and everyday life, optimization replaces judgment, metrics replace meaning, and processes continue operating even as their connection to real outcomes weakens. Nothing visibly breaks. Outputs remain coherent. Performance indicators still improve. Yet over time, these systems drift away from what they were originally built to track, measure, or support.

This divergence rarely appears as a sudden failure. Instead, it accumulates through small adjustments, reinterpretations, and efficiency-driven changes that seem reasonable in isolation. What remains is often functional, but increasingly less grounded in reality.

While the AI-generated images on the website are a bit jarring, especially given the content being described and covered, I think 'reality drift' it's a useful term to describe what happens when humans, and not just AI, are trained on AI-infused content.

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Source: Framework Maps