Hallucination (artificial intelligence)

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also called confabulation or delusion) is a response generated by AI which contains false or misleading information presented as fact. This term draws a loose analogy with human psychology, where hallucination typically involves false percepts. However, there’s a key difference: AI hallucination is associated with unjustified responses or beliefs rather than perceptual experiences.

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, with factual errors present in 46% of their responses. Detecting and mitigating these hallucinations pose significant challenges for practical deployment and reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. Some researchers believe the specific term "AI hallucination" unreasonably anthropomorphizes computers.