Hallucination (artificial intelligence)

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also called bullshitting,^[1][2] confabulation^[3] or delusion^[4]) is a response generated by AI that contains false or misleading information presented as fact.^[5][6] This term draws a loose analogy with human psychology, where hallucination typically involves false percepts. However, there is a key difference: AI hallucination is associated with erroneously constructed responses (confabulation), rather than perceptual experiences.^[6]

For example, a chatbot powered by large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, may embed plausible-sounding random falsehoods within its generated content. Researchers have recognized this issue, and by 2023, analysts estimated that chatbots hallucinate as much as 27% of the time,^[7] with factual errors present in 46% of generated texts.^[8] Detecting and mitigating these hallucinations pose significant challenges for practical deployment and reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios.^[9][7][8] Some people believe the specific term "AI hallucination" unreasonably anthropomorphizes computers.^[3]