When AI Generativity Becomes Human-Like: A Perturbative Field-Theoretic Analysis of Relational Coupling

Abstract

This paper asks whether artificial relational capacity can alter a social system's ability to regenerate human coupling even when artificial and human agents are assumed to be indistinguishable at the level of their generative dynamics. The question is therefore moved from agent deficiency or individual harm to the dynamics of coupling itself. Coupling is modelled as a dynamical variable that forms, decays, and responds to a relational deficit. A minimal two-channel model distinguishes human and artificial coupling only by formation, decay, substitution efficiency, and available artificial capacity. The perturbation is applied to coupling rather than to agent states, and the analysis examines equilibrium structure, local stability, and recovery. Three results follow. First, equilibrium human coupling decreases monotonically as artificial coupling capacity increases, even without any assumed inferiority of artificial agents. Second, substitution alone does not destabilise the system: with a positive baseline rate of human-coupling formation, the equilibrium remains linearly stable for every admissible artificial capacity. Third, loss of self-stabilisation appears only when an additional regenerative-dependence condition is introduced, so that new human coupling depends on human coupling already present. Under that condition the system undergoes a transcritical bifurcation at a critical artificial-coupling capacity, beyond which the zero-human-coupling state becomes stable even while the relational deficit can remain small. Approaching this boundary from below produces critical slowing, making recovery time after a relational breach a candidate observable of declining regenerative capacity. The paper's contribution is formal and diagnostic rather than predictive or normative. It separates displacement from destabilisation, identifies the additional mechanism required for collapse of human relational regeneration, derives the corresponding critical condition, and shows how recovery dynamics can make that loss empirically contestable. Its role is to specify, under explicit assumptions, when increasing artificial relational capacity is theoretically compatible with continued human relational self-stabilisation and when it can become structurally dangerous.