[__MatrixMan__]

There's room for splitting hairs in there though. Even fiction, for instance, can succeed or fail at being internally consistent, is or is not grammatically correct...

Calling everything an AI does a hallucination isn't incorrect, but it reduces the term to meaninglessness. I'm not sure that's most useful thing we can be doing.

Atoms are not indivisible, yet we use the term because it works. I anticipate hallucination will be the same.

[Gormo]

> Calling everything an AI does a hallucination isn't incorrect, but it reduces the term to meaninglessness.

I don't think it does. In this case, "hallucination" refers to claims generated entirely within a closed system, but which pertain to a reality external to it.

That's not meaningless, and makes "hallucinations" distinguishable from claims verified against direct observation of the reality they are meant to represent.

[namaria]

> Atoms are not indivisible

They are the smallest unit of a substance that cannot be broken down into smaller units of the same substance. They are, in a sense, indivisible.

[Timwi]

Of course they can. Carbon dioxide consists of quarks and electrons. I can divide it into units smaller than atoms and it's still quarks and electrons. All you did was a word trick by assuming a specific meaning of “substance”.

[namaria]

No word trick. Just pointing out that there's some nuance to it.

> Carbon dioxide consists of quarks and electrons.

But this is just plain wrong. Carbon dioxide consists of carbon dioxide molecules. There is no "carbon-dioxidity" to the quarks and electrons (which are also made of quarks) that the atoms that make the molecules can be broken down into.

[__MatrixMan__]

That's a good point, I hadn't thought about it that way. Maybe it's a little less of an arbitrary choice than I was giving it credit for.

It is not, however, Democratus's point. So I think the "words change, deal with it" argument still stands.