Well it's interesting - many LLM researchers reject "hallucination" in favour of the term "confabulation" but I'll double down and say that I still don't like either as they are both terms from clinical psych and I'll include a quote from an article[1] interviewing Usama Fayyad (executive director of Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential AI)

''' “I could say — these models hallucinated; or, to be more precise, I could say, well, the model made an error, and we understand that these models make errors,” Fayyad says. '''

For years we called the behaviour that researchers now call "hallucination" test error or misprediction or a failure to forecast correct outputs based on "out-of-sample" inputs and those terms were accurate and would still be accurate to use on today's LLM models.

Metaphors are great but can be misleading, people don't often make an argument that a computer mouse can feel pain.

[1] https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/11/10/ai-chatbot-hallucin...