Semantic Fidelity Project Lexicon: A Working Vocabulary for Meaning Preservation Across AI and Representational Systems

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This working lexicon provides a diagnostic vocabulary for describing how meaning is preserved, transformed, weakened, and recursively reused across AI systems and other representational environments.The document organizes its terms into foundational conditions, representation and reference, mechanisms of loss, retrieval and interpretation, memory and agency, optimization and evaluation, recursive ecosystems, and fidelity evaluation. It defines Semantic Fidelity, Semantic Drift, Representation Drift, Recursive Compression, Interpretation Failure, Memory Drift, Agent Drift, Proxy Substitution, Synthetic Coherence, Provenance Failure, Corrective Contact, and related concepts.The vocabulary connects semantic failures inside AI workflows to the broader conditions that allow coherent and operational representations to lose contact with their originating meaning, intent, context, and reality. The terms are diagnostic rather than exhaustive and may be refined as the Semantic Fidelity Project develops.