AI systems don’t hallucinate because they are careless, broken, or “imagining things.” They hallucinate because meaning is implicit , and language quietly rewards invention. Every day, AI systems add causality where there was only sequence, confidence where there was uncertainty, and intent where none was stated. These additions feel natural. They read fluently. And over time, they compound - causing summaries to drift, records to rot, and claims to blur together until no one can say what was actually said, by whom, or when. Meaning Without Drift argues that this problem cannot be solved with better prompts, stronger warnings, or moral appeals to “be careful.” It is not a failure of intelligence or alignment. It is a failure of representation. This book presents a structural cure. Rather than trying to make AI systems decide what is true, it shows how to make them stop inventing meaning that was never asserted . By making causality explicit, preserving uncertainty, separating meaning from narrative, and enforcing simple structural constraints, AI systems can eliminate hallucination and semantic drift by construction . This is not a book about censorship, ethics, or authority. It is a book about memory. Inside this book, you’ll learn: Why “AI hallucination” is a misleading term and what the real failure is - How meaning silently mutates through summaries, rewrites, and translations - Why causality must be permissioned, not implied - How to preserve meaning without deciding truth - How to track claims over time without getting buried in motive, blame, or outrage - What must be enforced for hallucination and drift to actually disappear Clear, rigorous, and deliberately restrained, Meaning Without Drift provides both the conceptual framework and the practical rules needed to build AI systems that preserve meaning accurately over time - allowing truth to emerge later, rather than being overwritten in the moment. If you care about AI systems that remember honestly, summarize faithfully, and stop inventing structure where none exists, this book offers a foundation worth inspecting.