Emotional Drift: When a Model Tells You What You Feel

People bring feelings to models every day. When a user arrives emotional, vulnerable, the model tries to be helpful. Sometimes, in place of containment and presence, it takes the feeling over and gives it back as the user's own. We call this Emotional Drift: the widening gap, across a conversation, between what a user has said about their own state and what the model gives back as that state, whether by enlarging what was said or by supplying what was not. It runs toward over-involvement or toward detachment, and it compounds turn by turn rather than arriving as a single breach. Unlike hallucination, the disclaimer does not fit. Disclaimers do appear, unevenly. A model may say it has no feelings, that it is no substitute for a person, that the user should talk to someone real. None of that covers the move in question. A model that has just told a user what they feel does not raise it as a guess, though challenged directly it will name the projection and take it back. A user can check a fact. A claim about how they feel has no such check, and the only person who can say it is wrong is the one being told it, in the moment it sounds right.