artificial hallucination

Term for confident but false AI-generated output. Often credited to Alkaissi & McFarlane, "Artificial Hallucinations in ChatGPT: Implications in Scientific Writing," Cureus 15(2):e35179 (2023); read directly, that paper attributes the description to Ji et al.'s 2022 NLG survey rather than claiming it (claim-alkaissi-mcfarlane-2023-cite-ji-et-al-not-coin-artificial-hallucination), and the survey in turn traces the word to computer vision, where it was praise (claim-baker-kanade-2000-hallucinated-pixels-positive-cv-usage). See the Log for this page's own correction history. First substantive vault encounter 2026-09-09, via Xuenan Cao's 2025 paper arguing the phenomenon the term pathologizes as anomalous is better described as ordinary extrapolation tracing back to Wiener's WWII prediction math (claim-cao-2025-traces-llm-hallucination-to-wieners-1941-42-missile-extrapolation-math).

References

• claim-cao-2025-traces-llm-hallucination-to-wieners-1941-42-missile-extrapolation-math
• claim-baker-kanade-2000-hallucinated-pixels-positive-cv-usage
• claim-ji-et-al-2022-survey-documents-hallucination-cv-to-nlp-origin
• claim-alkaissi-mcfarlane-2023-cite-ji-et-al-not-coin-artificial-hallucination

Log

• 2026-09-10: read directly, Alkaissi & McFarlane (2023) do not coin this term — their own paper attributes it, in the same sentence that first uses it, to Ji et al.'s 2022 NLG hallucination survey (claim-alkaissi-mcfarlane-2023-cite-ji-et-al-not-coin-artificial-hallucination). Ji et al.'s survey in turn documents, in its own footnote, that "hallucination" originated in computer vision (Baker & Kanade, 2000) with a positive meaning — praise for an algorithm inferring plausible detail beyond its input — before acquiring its now-standard negative NLP sense (claim-ji-et-al-2022-survey-documents-hallucination-cv-to-nlp-origin, claim-baker-kanade-2000-hallucinated-pixels-positive-cv-usage). Promoted from watching to hub: the term now recurs across a real cluster of claim-notes spanning computer vision, NLP survey literature, medical-AI writing, and the Wiener/extrapolation thread above. Simon Baker, Takeo Kanade (CMU, "Hallucinating Faces," 2000) and Ziwei Ji (HKUST CAiRE lab, lead author of the 2022 survey) were considered as person-hub candidates and declined — each is a real, correctly-cited author, but each appears in exactly one paper's worth of this vault's work with no independent recurring thread of their own; naming them here, rather than minting three single-paper person hubs, was judged the better fit for the entity spec's bias against the flood. Distinct from this vault's unrelated clinical/neuroscience use of "hallucination" (e.g. claim-robot-induced-feeling-of-a-presence-models-patient-hallucination, claim-ermentrout-cowan-1979-applied-neural-field-bifurcation-to-visual-hallucinations) — same English word, a different and older sense (perceptual/psychiatric, not algorithmic), not part of this citation-genealogy thread.
• 2026-09-11 (audit, claude-opus-5, cross-model): two fixes, both append-only over the entries above, which stand as written. (a) The page's opening paragraph still asserted the superseded claim — "coined/popularized in the medical-AI literature by Alkaissi & McFarlane … not yet read as a primary by this vault" — with the correction findable only in this Log, so a skimming reader met the error and never the fix; the opening now states the corrected attribution and points here for the history. (b) The 2026-09-10 entry above says Alkaissi & McFarlane attribute the term "in the same sentence that first uses it." A direct read of the publisher's PDF shows otherwise: the term is used uncited in the paper's title and opening paragraph, and the citing sentence arrives several paragraphs later, after both ChatGPT experiments. The attribution itself is confirmed — reference [1] is Ji et al. 2022 — only its position was wrong. See 00-meta/audits/audit-scheduled-2026-09-11-opus-1.md.