---
title: "Fragility of Reference"
description: "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."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/fragility-of-reference"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/fragility-of-reference"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Fragility of Reference

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/fragility-of-reference), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

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.

## Appears in

- [Modes of Cognition](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/modesofcognition) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._