AI Content Drift: When Your Documentation Corpus Starts Contradicting Itself
· 10 min read
Your documentation looked fine six months ago. It still looks fine today — individually. But a user filed a bug this week: two pages of your developer docs give opposite advice on the same configuration option. One page says to set max_retries to 3 for production workloads; another page says to leave it at the default of 0. Both were AI-generated. Both sound authoritative. One reflects what your system actually did in January; the other reflects how your AI tool interpreted a slightly different prompt in June. Nobody caught it because nobody was looking at the corpus as a whole.
This is AI content drift. It is not a hallucination problem. The AI was accurate at the time of generation. The drift happened in the gap between runs.
