AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Unseen beasts drift faster
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
Unseen beasts drift faster. Bestiary images descend copy by copy, but the copyist's eye corrects toward nature only where nature is available: a fox or hedgehog is re-anchored by daily perception, while a crocodile, whale, or bonnacon is pure graphic descent with no external referent. Iconographic drift rate should therefore split by the animal's local observability, not by its textual prominence or page rank — perception acts as an error-correcting code that exotic creatures never receive.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (the verdict follows it): across the digitized English bestiary corpus (Families I and II, a dozen or more complete witnesses), landmark-based shape distance between matched images of the same creature in related witnesses is at least twice as large, on average, for exotic and fabulous creatures as for locally observable ones, controlling for image size and frame. Secondary clause: categorical copying errors — mirror reversals, changed limb counts, lost diagnostic attributes — occur in exotic creatures at at least three times the local-animal rate.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Aberdeen Bestiary's complete open digitization, Bodleian MSS Ashmole 1511 and Bodley 764 on Digital Bodleian, and the British Library's digitized bestiaries in the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries); 278-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w05_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W05 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. A platform output-limit resume occurred before the single Write; no additional tool calls or information ingress occurred.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The mechanism — exotic creatures copied graphically without a natural referent while familiar animals are re-anchored by observation — is a standard explanation in bestiary scholarship, though it also notes inaccuracy in familiar animals; the landmark-based drift-rate quantification across witnesses is un-run.
Predictions
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