AI doesn’t make things up: It “believes” (doesn’t actually have belief) a real thing just as much as a false thing. The two are indistinguishable to LLMs because the only “true” thing for a chatbot is the existence of text and tokens. Everything else is meaningless to the math.

Does my sewer pipe have imagination because is spewed black goop across my kitchen instead of carrying my waste water away like it normally does? Is my TV hallucinating a new show because the screen got damaged at the factory? Did a printing press create art when it smudged the text on my paperback?

LLMs are tools with a high defect rate which tech billionaires and the media branded as hallucintation to sound more impressive.