Fragility of Reference

Hayles's term (from Bacteria to AI) for the systemic weakness of LLMs at referring to the physical world and the documentary record: navigation and weight-of-coins errors, fabricated citations in legal briefs. She treats it as the price of having "no model of the world, only a model of language" — while also holding that correlation networks encode the human lifeworld in depth, a tension she does not resolve. Margin note 72 reframes a hallucinated letter as something a human would be credited with as creativity. Pairs with the journal's "Model Epistemology" and "Sim-to-Real Gap" entries as a humanities-side account of model/world mismatch.