[rsynnott]

I mean, 'hallucination' as applied to LLMs has _never_ referred to actual hallucinations. For better or for worse, it has become a blanket term for whatever old nonsense the stochastic parrot vomits forth.

(Personally I never liked the term; it's inappropriate anthropomorphism and will tend to mislead people about what's actually going on. 'Slop' is arguably a better term, but it is broader, in that it can refer to LLM output which is merely _bad_.)

[kazinator]

No of course, not; it refers to generated speech which refer to things which are not there, reminiscent of someone reporting on their hallucinations.

When MacBeth speaks these lines:

Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

the character is understood to be hallucinating. We infer that by applying a theory of mind type hypothesis to the text.

It's wrong to apply a theory of mind to an LLM, but the glove seems to fit in the case of the hallucination concept; people have latched on to it. The LLMs themselves use the term and explicitly apologize for having hallucinated.