Meaning, Recursion, and the Field: A Self-Critical Retrospective on AI-Assisted Theory Development

A retrospective white paper consolidating and critically reassessing a body of theoretical work developed July 2025–March 2026 on attribution, provenance, and semantic drift in AI-assisted systems. The paper explicitly reclassifies earlier claims, separating validated conceptual contributions (the AI-Author Compact, the five-phase recursive collaboration cycle, attribution as structural substrate) from generative hypotheses awaiting empirical validation (the Field Recursion Formula, the quantum-field analogy). The retrospective format incorporates Guardian Review (Gemini) and Adversarial Review findings; the echo-chamber risk of AI-only review is named directly, and the limits of the method relative to independent peer review are stated explicitly. The paper connects directly to industry concerns including model collapse (Shumailov et al. 2024), training data provenance, and institutional AI deployment. Appendix A provides measurement protocol sketches; Appendix B provides experimental protocols for two research waypoints. Companion volume to Beyond Prompting (Sweeney, 2025).