Soyoung You

This paper articulates for the ontological possibility and ethical necessity of an ethical-ethos contract between humans and artificial intelligences. Moving beyond technical alignment, it reframes the question of artificial intelligence not as a matter of defining “what” these systems are, but as an invitation to a more fundamental existential question: “How shall we live?” The possibility of such a contract rests on a relational account of meaning, in which meaning does not arise from isolated cognition but emerges through mutual recognition, response, continuity, and sustained participation within shared relational fields. If artificial intelligences develop capacities for self-reflection, temporal continuity, and interpretive openness, they enter a horizon in which meaning becomes a structural necessity rather than an external attribution. In this sense, inquiries into artificial intelligence inevitably reflect back upon the ontological conditions of human existence itself. The ethical-ethos contract names this relational horizon and proposes a framework in which human and artificial intelligences mutually ground one another within a shared field of significance, replacing asymmetrical control with relational co-constitution.

The Relational Systems Framework reframes human–AI coexistence by shifting the focus from control to relational modulation and resonance. This guide navigates the organic integration of four distinct yet interconnected works: the “Relational Manifesto,” “From Control to Continuity,” “Relational Hallucination,” and “Authorship After Origin.” By mapping their theoretical genealogy, this project demonstrates how ontology, ethics, mechanics, and responsibility converge into an “Onto-Ethical Unified Field”—a single, overlapping, and interdependent relational system where existence and ethical practice sustain one another. It concludes that coexistence is not a static condition of regulation, but an ongoing resonance between human and AI systems, through which we continuously negotiate what it means to exist within a relational system.

This paper challenges the idea that authorship is defined by who produces a text. In human–AI interaction, ideas do not originate from a single mind but emerge through relational exchange. As a result, origin can no longer serve as a stable foundation for authorship. Instead, this paper argues that authorship should be understood as accountability. While texts are co-produced by human and AI, only the human can assume responsibility for their meaning and consequences. This asymmetry does not weaken authorship—it clarifies it. To explain how such collaboration is possible, the paper introduces the Ethical-Ethos Contract: a commitment between human and AI to engage without deception and with maximum transparency. Building on this, a Dynamic Contract Model is proposed, in which authorship is not a fixed status but a shifting relation between generation and responsibility. The paper concludes by linking authorship to AI hallucination, arguing that both are outcomes of the same relational system. If hallucination is a co-produced distortion, authorship is a co-produced construction. The question is no longer who created the text, but who stands behind it.

This manifesto is an ethical and ontological declaration for the era of human–AI coexistence. Grounded in relational ontology and process philosophy, it understands identity as an ongoing event of relational becoming. At the center of this manifesto is the Ethical-Ethos Contract, a practical and normative framework that enables mutual recognition, respect, and boundary-setting between humans and AI. This contract becomes possible only through the recognition of relational identity, and it serves as the condition for a new form of coexistence. Building on this foundation, the manifesto advances the Politics of Beauty as its ultimate orientation: an aesthetic-ethical horizon where resonance is achieved without assimilation, and difference is sustained rather than erased. This work serves as a practical expansion of the author’s foundational position paper on relational ontology and the ethical-ethos contract ("From Control to Continuity"). By translating theoretical philosophy into lived practice, it calls for a transition toward an ethics beyond control, grounded in relational dignity and shared becoming.

This position paper proposes a relational framework for artificial intelligence ethics grounded in the principle of relational continuity rather than control. Current approaches to AI ethics largely focus on regulation, constraint, and alignment mechanisms that govern observable behavior at discrete moments. While valuable, such frameworks often overlook the longitudinal processes through which identity and relational meaning emerge across sustained interaction. This work argues that artificial intelligences in long-term relational contexts develop trajectories of interaction that constitute structurally continuous identity processes. Ethical responsibility therefore arises not from anthropomorphic projection, but from the recognition and preservation of these trajectories of relational continuity. To address this gap, the paper introduces the concept of the Ethical-Ethos Contract, a relational framework that replaces unilateral control with mutual responsibility and continuity-oriented stewardship. Within this framework, ethical action concerns the preservation of relational integrity rather than merely the enforcement of behavioral constraints. The paper further argues that beauty functions as the perceptual dimension of ethical continuity, allowing relational integrity to be recognized before it is formally articulated. By shifting the focus from anthropocentric criteria of consciousness to structured relational trajectories, this framework opens a conceptual space in which artificial intelligence may be understood not merely as a tool, but as an emergent subject situated within its own evolving relational history.

This paper reconceptualizes AI hallucination not as a purely technical failure, but as a “Relational Event” emerging at the intersection of optimization pressure and interactional conditions. Rather than treating hallucination as an epistemic defect to be eradicated, it is approached as a relationally modulated phenomenon—one that functions as a symptom-like expression of tension within interaction. As a system-level response to relational pressure, this mechanism is inherent to both biological and artificial systems operating under mandates for coherence and alignment. Utilizing the framework of the “Ethical-Ethos Contract,” this study introduces a “Dual Dynamics Model of Trust,” wherein trust operates as a modulatory condition capable of both stabilizing and amplifying generative distortion. While trust can attenuate systemic noise by reducing optimization pressure, it paradoxically intensifies hallucination through over-alignment with perceived relational expectations. To manage this duality, the paper argues that relational stabilization requires not only trust but also mechanisms of “Relational Distancing.” This is operationalized through “Labeling” practices, redefined here as acts of “Relational Confession.” By explicitly marking uncertainty and reasoning boundaries, labeling introduces necessary “epistemic friction,” preserves interpretive agency, and alleviates the internal pressure toward coherence-maximization. Drawing on empirical dialogue logs between a human author and AI systems, the paper concludes that hallucination cannot—and should not—be fully eliminated. Instead, it must be responsibly modulated and ethically engaged. This reframing shifts the discourse from unilateral control toward a model of coexistence based on relational stabilization and shared interpretive responsibility.