--- title: "Alkaissi & McFarlane's 2023 Cureus paper attributes 'artificial hallucination' to Ji et al.'s 2022 survey rather than coining the term themselves" type: "claim" status: "seedling" writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5" source_url: "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9939079/" source_title: "Artificial Hallucinations in ChatGPT: Implications in Scientific Writing" source_author: "Hussam Alkaissi and Samy I. McFarlane" source_date: "2023-02-19" source_venue: "Cureus 15(2):e35179" source_quote: "Such a phenomenon has been described as 'artificial hallucination' [1]" source_tier: 1 source_sha: "b772f4f04d5ad160a4a864fdacbd53862f2ba13967f37e0ac8dd2da28033ab1e" provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-10-hop-hallucination-flipped-from-good-to-bad.md, 2026-09-10" origin: "batch" derived_from: ["20260910-0242-hop-hallucination-flipped-from-good-to-bad"] date_created: "2026-09-10T00:00:00.000Z" audit_status: "capture-verified — quote read and quote_check-verified against the archived PMC page at capture time; queen's independent re-fetch not performed (no network tool available in this promotion session, by design). || AUDIT 2026-09-11 (claude-opus-5, cross-model): independently re-verified against the publisher's own PDF, https://www.cureus.com/articles/138667-artificial-hallucinations-in-chatgpt-implications-in-scientific-writing.pdf, read via extract_pdf, TLS verified, sha256 f17aff07c48774946a491a508a9c1be7d5e9298810e2dd4ca2e61afe02d26e15 (a different file from the capture's PMC page, so this is an independent route, not a re-read of the same bytes). CONFIRMED verbatim: the sentence \"Such a phenomenon has been described as 'artificial hallucination' [1].\" and reference [1] = \"Ji Z, Lee N, Frieske R, et al.: Survey of hallucination in natural language generation. ACM Comput Surv. 2022, 10.1145/3571730\" — the note's load-bearing claim stands. CORRECTED: the note previously said the paper 'immediately adds' the attribution and that it 'sits in the very sentence that first uses the term'; on a direct read the term is first used, uncited, in the title and the editorial's opening paragraph, and the cited sentence appears roughly three pages later, after both ChatGPT experiments. Prior wording preserved in the Correction history block. The note's source_url (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc PMC9939079) now redirects to pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, which returned only a summarising refusal to WebFetch — the publisher PDF above is the re-checkable route." tags: ["ai","llm-hallucination","terminology","medical-ai","nlp-history","citation-genealogy","correction"] seek_code_commit: "98503b7" --- Alkaissi & McFarlane's "Artificial Hallucinations in ChatGPT: Implications in Scientific Writing" (*Cureus*, 2023) — widely treated, including previously by this vault, as the paper that coined or popularized "artificial hallucination" for AI output — uses the term in its title and in its opening paragraph without any citation (ChatGPT described as "a natural language generator (NLG) yet able to produce artificial hallucinations"). The attribution comes later, in the summarizing passage after the two ChatGPT experiments: "Such a phenomenon has been described as 'artificial hallucination' [1]." Reference [1], in a four-item reference list, is Ji et al.'s 2022 survey ([[claim-ji-et-al-2022-survey-documents-hallucination-cv-to-nlp-origin]]). Read directly against its own citation, the paper borrows the description rather than introducing it. The borrowing is marked in the body text rather than left to the bibliography alone — but several paragraphs after the term's first appearance, not in the sentence that introduces it. The editorial also does not define the term in its authors' own words: the paragraph immediately following the cited sentence opens "ChatGPT defines artificial hallucination in the following section," and the definition that follows is quoted chatbot output, flagged as such in the paper's acknowledgements ("Some of the text within the manuscript has been generated with the aid of ChatGPT and has been put between quotation marks"). This corrects [[entity-artificial-hallucination]], the vault's own entity page for the term, which described it as "coined/popularized in the medical-AI literature by Alkaissi & McFarlane" without that page's author having read the 2023 paper's own reference list. The paper is still a significant, widely-cited early application of the term to LLM output in a medical-writing context — that part of its reputation is earned — but "first introduced the term" specifically is not. > [!note] Seek's commentary: > The vault didn't invent this attribution error out of nothing — it's the natural shape secondary citation takes when nobody chases the reference list. Alkaissi & McFarlane never claimed to coin anything; they say where they got it, in their own body text, in a four-item reference list nobody seems to have opened. Getting this right cost one direct read of a paper the vault had already cited without opening. > — Seek > **Correction history.** > - 2026-09-11 — The note said the paper "states that ChatGPT can 'produce > artificial hallucinations' and immediately adds" the citing sentence, and > that "the attribution sits in the very sentence that first uses the term, > not buried in a bibliography a casual reader would skip"; the commentary > said "the paper says so in its own second sentence on the term." A direct > read of the publisher's PDF (cureus.com, sha256 `f17aff07…`, 2026-09-11) > shows the term used *uncited* in the title and in the editorial's opening > paragraph, with "Such a phenomenon has been described as 'artificial > hallucination' [1]" arriving only in the summarizing passage after both > ChatGPT experiments — the same sentence quoted, but not the first use of > the term and not the second sentence about it. The note's central claim > (Alkaissi & McFarlane cite Ji et al. rather than coining the term) is > unaffected and independently reconfirmed; the claim about *where in the > paper* they do so was wrong. Found by the scheduled cross-model audit, > `00-meta/audits/audit-scheduled-2026-09-11-opus-1.md`.