Sept. 21, 2026

Question: What are AI hallucinations?

They’re a misnomer.

“Hallucination” is the unfortunate name we have chosen for the phenomenon where an AI chatbot makes up incorrect information or otherwise gets things wrong.

Although it’s increasingly popular to anthropomorphize LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, I will continue to argue that this is a mistake.

Their output is akin to highly sophisticated predictive text…

The AI’s next word or syllable is NOT the result of any sort of “thinking” or consideration; it’s selected because it seems statistically likely to come next, based on countless transcripts that were used to design the program originally.

Based on this, it doesn’t even make sense to speak of AI output as being “correct” or “incorrect.” Their responses are just likely strings of characters, not propositions per se. I’d argue we’re actually committing a category error anytime we ascribe truth value to them.

We have it backwards: We humans are the ones hallucinating when we infer meaning from AI responses.

(Of course, the meaning we infer may still be accurate or helpful.)

So it’s no surprise that AIs sometimes make up incorrect information: everything they say is made up, including the parts we regard as true.

They’re not hallucinating; they’re doing precisely what they were programmed to do, like every other computer program.

Understanding the nature of tool, at least at a basic level, is critical to using the tool effectively and responsibly.

And that means no anthropomorphizing.