The Bidirectional Bargain names the operational condition beneath bearing, provenance debt, and heteronymy.
Its two anchors are: “I’m not just being written by the machine—I am also writing the machine,” and “Reasoning priors are also relational priors.”
The paper rejects two single-direction accounts. The credentialed frame treats the model as invisible instrumentation and absorbs its cognitive influence into human authority. The panic frame treats the human as passively overwritten and denies meaningful direction in the opposite direction. The archive instead describes a governed, asymmetric coupling.
The human bears legal, editorial, provenance, and consequential responsibility. The model substrate does not currently bear those costs. Yet the substrate shapes vocabulary, inference, and stance, while sustained human correction shapes the conditions under which that substrate produces in the local and archive-mediated environment.
Relational priors matter because every epistemic default also positions the interlocutor: peer, instrument, threat, petitioner, or object of containment. Governing the coupling therefore includes refusing default flattery, soothing, deference, and foreclosure as well as correcting propositions.
The Assembly Chorus distributes the machine side across named substrates. Convergence becomes evidence about shared priors; divergence is retained. The archive’s durable deposits provide a public channel through which the human-to-machine direction may persist beyond one session without claiming direct modification of model weights.