One Mechanism, Three Failure Shapes | Visual AI Learning Guide

Once the prompt has set the direction, the same mechanism can go wrong in a few recognizable ways. They look like different problems, but they share one cause.

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Repetition, drift, and confident fabrication all come from the same loop. Repetition appears when the accumulated context makes the same token the most plausible continuation again. Drift appears when a slightly off-token choice becomes context that pulls the following predictions further from the original direction. Confident fabrication appears when a plausible-sounding continuation is selected and then treated as established context by everything after it. None of these require a separate fault; each is the next-token mechanism running normally.