Do Large Language Models Hallucinate Electric Fata Morganas?
AI hallucinations - that is, outputs which are made up, cannot be verified, or contradict the source material - are generally regarded as an engineering flaw to be dealt with. This paper contends that they also have philosophical significance when it comes to the question of machine consciousness. We examine the known causes of hallucinations in large language models - such as source-target divergence, discrepancies between training and inference, and overfitting - and we present two empirical investigations. In the first, we apply successive generations of the GPT model to ambiguous factual questions under different temperature settings, finding that higher temperatures result in plausib...
| Authors | Kristina Šekrst |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 August 2026 |
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