hallucination
/həˌluːsɪˈneɪʃən/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.89 in modern English
18
Scrabble Score
13
Letters
5
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A sensory perception of something that does not exist, often arising from disorder of the nervous system, as in delirium tremens.
Countable; Uncountable
noun
The act of hallucinating; a wandering of the mind; an error, mistake or blunder.
Countable; Uncountable
noun
A confident but incorrect response given by an artificial intelligence; a confabulation.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Hallucinations are always evidence of cerebral derangement and are common phenomena of insanity."
- "The authorities said that the spinach had caused “possible food-related toxic reactions” with those affected experiencing symptoms including delirium, hallucinations, blurred vision, rapid heartbeat and fever."
- "This must have been the hallucination of the transcriber."
- "We first identify prominent modes of hallucination by conducting a systematic human study on generated responses which reveals one major source of hallucination as the (mis)-use of wrong entities to describe factual content (Kryscinski et al., 2020), a problem that persists when naively applying language models in dialogue systems. […] NPH follows a generate-then-refine approach by augmenting conventional dialogue generation with an additional refinement stage enabling the dialogue system to correct potential hallucinations by querying the KG."
- "Chatbots even forget that they are a bot and experience "hallucinations", Meta's description for when a bot confidently says something that is not true."
- "Hallucinations are about adhering to the truth; when A.I. systems get confused, they have a bad habit of making things up rather than admitting their difficulties."
Etymology
From hallucinate + -ion, from Latin hallucinatus. Compare French hallucination. The first known usage in the English language is from Sir Thomas Browne.