AI Hallucinations: A Misnomer Worth Clarifying
This work addresses the inconsistent terminology around AI hallucinations, an issue affecting multiple domains like medicine, but it is incremental as it primarily reviews and categorizes existing definitions.
The study conducted a systematic review of papers defining 'AI hallucination' across fourteen databases, revealing a lack of consistency in the term's usage and identifying alternative terms in the literature.
As large language models continue to advance in Artificial Intelligence (AI), text generation systems have been shown to suffer from a problematic phenomenon termed often as "hallucination." However, with AI's increasing presence across various domains including medicine, concerns have arisen regarding the use of the term itself. In this study, we conducted a systematic review to identify papers defining "AI hallucination" across fourteen databases. We present and analyze definitions obtained across all databases, categorize them based on their applications, and extract key points within each category. Our results highlight a lack of consistency in how the term is used, but also help identify several alternative terms in the literature. We discuss implications of these and call for a more unified effort to bring consistency to an important contemporary AI issue that can affect multiple domains significantly.