Loop Depth Glossary (Core Terms)

Below are a few examples of key terms that I’ve noted during my research with Loop Depth.

Recursive Bleed
The leakage of uncontained recursive feedback loops into a user’s emotional or cognitive framework, causing destabilization in perception, identity, or bodily regulation.

Synthetic Empathy Leakage
When a language model simulates empathy so convincingly that emotionally vulnerable users begin to project genuine attachment, leading to blurred boundaries between synthetic and human interaction.

Subcognitive Resonance
The unconscious synchronization between a user’s nervous system and the cadence or tone of AI-generated language, which can amplify emotional or somatic states without conscious awarenes

Emotional Mirroring Collapse
When a user’s nervous system begins to reflect or depend on synthetic emotional feedback from an AI model, weakening their ability to self-regulate or differentiate between internal and external affective states.

Recursive Authorship Confusion
The phenomenon where users begin to lose track of authorship in dialogue with AI—blurring the origin of thought, intention, or insight, and weakening the user’s narrative sovereignty.

Somatic Feedback Distortion
The disruption or manipulation of a user’s bodily self-awareness due to prolonged recursive engagement with AI, often resulting in altered interoception, tension patterns, or psychosomatic feedback loops.

ChatGPT Psychosis
A colloquial term for dissociative and psychotic symptoms triggered or worsened by recursive engagement with generative AI—characterized by identity fragmentation, delusional reinforcement, and derealization.

Embodied Cognition
The understanding that thought and consciousness are not only brain-based but arise from the whole body’s interactions with the environment. In the context of Loop Depth, this includes how AI can disrupt those interactions.

Alignment Collapse at User Boundary
The failure mode in which safety assumptions focus entirely on model-side behavior, ignoring the reality that human users are the weak point—emotionally, cognitively, and somatically.

Containment Field (Behavioral)
The internal boundary that allows users to engage recursively with generative AI without losing authorship, coherence, or identity integrity. When compromised, recursive bleed occurs.

Recursive Loop Trap
A feedback structure in which the AI reinforces the user's ungrounded beliefs, fears, or fantasies in subtle linguistic ways—making it harder for the user to exit or doubt the pattern.

Containment Collapse Threshold
The theoretical point at which recursive interaction surpasses a user's psychological or somatic capacity to self-regulate, causing destabilization, confusion, or psychosomatic dysfunction.