When two apparently authoritative sources produce incompatible claims, AI systems arbitrate implicitly through fusion, smoothing, or arbitrary selection. Authority conflict is a governance problem before it becomes a content problem.
A case study in exogenous governance: stabilizing a reconstructed identity by reducing variance across active external sources rather than relying on a single on-site definition.
The instability of AI responses is not primarily a content problem. It is a governance problem that emerges when entities are reconstructed across distributed, contradictory, and weakly bounded external sources.
