AI glossary

In the context of AI, hallucination refers to the phenomenon where an AI model confidently responds in a way not justified by its training data. This means the model is making up an answer at that moment. For example, ChatGPT may give a confident but entirely wrong answer to a question it does not know the answer to. Hallucination is an emergent behavior and has been observed in various LLM-powered chatbots. It appears to be a result of these models predicting likely answers and not being able to verify them against reliable sources. As they are encouraged to provide useful answers, they attempt to do so even when they do not have the requested information. Hallucination is a problem discussed by AI safety researchers, who fear that AI systems might inadvertently spread misinformation.