Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

After an interview with Cory Doctorow I saw recently, I'm going to stop anthropomorphizing these things by calling them "hallucinations". They're computers, so these incidents are just simply Errors.

I'll continue calling them hallucinations. That's a much more fitting term when you account for the reasonableness of people who believe them. There's also equally a huge breadth of different types of errors that don't pattern match well into, "made up bullshit" the same way calling them hallucinations do. There's no need to introduce that ambiguity when discussing something narrow.

there's nothing wrong with anthropomorphizing genai, it's source material is human sourced, and humans are going to use human like pattern matching when interacting with it. I.e. This isn't the river I want to swim upstream in. I assume you wouldn't complain if someone anthropomorphized a rock... up until they started to believe it was actually alive.

Given that an (incompetent or even malicious) human put their names(s) to this stuff, “bullshit” is an even better and fitting anthropomorphization

> incompetent or even malicious

sufficiently advance some competences indistinguishable from actual malice.... and thus should be treated the same

Developers have been anthropomorphizing computers for as long as they've been around though.

"The compiler thinks my variable isn't declared" "That function wants a null-terminated string" "Teach this code to use a cache"

Even the word computer once referred to a human.

They're a very specific kind of error, just like off-by-one errors, or I/O errors, or network errors. The name for this kind of error is a hallucination.

We need a word for this specific kind of error, and we have one, so we use it. Being less specific about a type of error isn't helping anyone. Whether it "anthropomorphizes", I couldn't care less. Heck, bugs come from actual insects. It's a word we've collectively started to use and it works.

We still use term bug. And no modern bug is cause by an Arthropod. In that sense I think hallucination is fair term. As coming up anything sufficiently better is hard.

Nah it's very apt and perfectly encapsulates output that looks plausible but is in fact factually incorrect or made up.

An actually better (and also more accurate) term would be “confabulations”. Unfortunately, it has not caught on.

No it’s not. It’s made up bullshit that arises for reasons that literally no one can formalize or reliably prevent. This is the exact opposite of specific.

Just because we can't reliably prevent them doesn't mean they're not an easily recognizable and meaningful category of error for us to talk about.