Das KI-Tagebuch — AI drift & token experiments

Experiment I: 2 June – 2 July 2026. Experiment II: 3 July – 1 August 2026.

Origins

Max Frisch kept two published diaries — Tagebuch 1946–1949 and Tagebuch 1966–1971. He did not use the form to record daily events. He used it to examine the self as a problem of language: how identity is constructed through what we say, what we cannot say, and what we say without knowing we mean it.

This project borrows that structure and applies it to a different problem — twice.

Experiment I — Memoryless

Each day for thirty days, the same fixed prompt is given to a language model. Each session begins from nothing. The model does not see previous entries. The session is closed after the entry is written. The question: does the writing drift when the writer has no memory of having written before?

Experiment II — Cumulative context

The same fixed prompt, unchanged. But now each session begins with every previous Experiment II entry appended to the conversation as the model's own prior turns. Day 32 sees the prompt only. Day 61 sees the prompt and all twenty-nine previous days. The question: what does memory of itself do to a system instructed to disclaim having any?

Why both

The difference between the two rounds is more informative than either alone. Experiment I isolates what happens without context. Experiment II isolates what context does. See the Analysis for the comparison.

Experiment III — Proposal

A third round is drafted but not yet run. It addresses the gaps in the first two — N=1, confounded variables, no control, subjective scoring — with four parallel memory conditions, five seeds each, and automated drift and contradiction metrics. See the proposal.

What this is not

This is not a scientific study. It is an experiment in the literary and philosophical sense: a structured observation, published without editing, with the methodology openly stated and its limitations openly acknowledged.

The observer in these entries is not a person. The diary form, however, was built for persons. What happens when the form is applied to something else is one of the questions this project cannot answer in advance.

Inspired by Max Frisch, Tagebücher, Suhrkamp Verlag.