Meaning Fixation and Intimacy Tagging, Compression, and Decision-Freezing in Human–AI Adjacent Interaction

This paper examines meaning fixation as an observable phenomenon occurring in intimate human interaction, prior to and independently of AI mediation. Through a micro-case derived from everyday dialogue, we analyze how emotional signals become compressed into tags, how interpretation solidifies prematurely, and how this process produces a form of decision-freezing. Rather than treating loneliness, desire for contact, or avoidance as psychological traits, this paper frames them as relational artifacts produced by tagging and weighting mechanisms. This mechanism is shown to be structurally analogous to anthropomorphic misattribution in AI systems, suggesting that contemporary anxieties around AI ethics reflect a pre-existing human tendency to fix meaning in order to stabilize relational uncertainty. The analysis positions ethics not as regulation or restraint, but as a practice of maintaining interpretive openness under pressure.