The Confabulation of AI Hallucinations

Some people prefer to use other terms to describe what AI does when it starts to invent things in response to a query from a user. So some have proposed the word confabulation as an alternative descriptor of what's going on. In human psychology, a confabulation is when we have a hitch in our memory and so we fill in a gap that's in our memory. We're not doing it consciously. It just happens. That's kind of what's happening with AI hallucinations only.