Confabulation

An alternative term for hallucination, used in the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology Generative AI Profile (NIST AI 600-1, 2024) to name confidently stated but erroneous or fabricated content. Preferred by some researchers because "hallucination" borrows a clinical term for perceiving things that are not present, and NIST's own framing cautions that terms like "hallucination" risk implying the system has perceptions or intentions it does not have. Either word names the same behavior; neither implies the model is aware of what it is doing.

the technically precise term the NIST Generative AI Profile (AI 600-1) uses for what is colloquially called AI "hallucination," a generative AI system producing fluent but factually incorrect or fabricated output.

The Generative AI Profile's term for a generative model producing confident, fluent output that is false, commonly called hallucination. Named as one of the twelve generative-AI risk categories because a confident false output can be more dangerous than an obvious error.

The established tendency of a generative AI model, including one that retrieves documents or calls tools on your behalf, to produce confident, plausible, false output; the reason every AI-surfaced red-team finding is a lead to verify, not a verdict (NIST AI 600-1, Generative AI Profile, 2024).