Every week brings another headline about an AI confidently making something up. A chatbot invents a corporate scandal. A lawyer submits six fabricated legal precedents to a federal judge. A $440,000 government consulting report cites sources that don't exist. The tech industry calls this hallucination, but that word, borrowed from psychology, may actually let developers off the hook by framing a software flaw as a quirky human-like trait.

This episode traces the term's origins back to 1986, when "face hallucination" was a positive descriptor for algorithms that enhanced blurry security camera images by synthesizing realistic details. It was a feature, not a bug. By the 2010s, the word had flipped to describe translation models that prioritized linguistic fluency over factual accuracy, and after ChatGPT's release in 2022, it became the domin ...