The paper investigates why large language models (LLMs) produce hallucinations—outputs that are fabricated, unverifiable, or contradictory to source material—and argues that these hallucinations have philosophical implications for machine consciousness. It reviews known causes such as source‑target divergence, training‑inference discrepancies, and overfitting, and presents two empirical studies: one showing that higher temperature settings in GPT models yield plausible but incorrect answers, while lower temperatures produce accurate ones; and another demonstrating that an encoder‑only model trained on encyclopedic data answers factually without embellishment, suggesting hallucinations arise from exposure to subjective, socially diverse data rather than cognitive ability. Drawing on Turing, Searle’s Chinese Room, the frame problem, and cybernetic theory, the authors contend that a model’s self‑reports of emotion or sentience fall within the definition of hallucination, implying that any future machine consciousness may remain epistemically inaccessible because it would be indistinguishable from an advanced hallucination.
arXiv:2603. 09986v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hallucinations, the tendency for large language models to provide responses with factually incorrect and unsupported claims, is a serious problem within natural language processing for which we do not yet have an effective solution to mitigate against.
arXiv:2606. 07537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models hallucinate--producing fluent, confident, factually wrong outputs--with a consistency that persists across generations and scales.
arXiv:2608. 19206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly aligned to suppress hallucinations, prioritizing factual retrieval over combinatorial creativity.
arXiv:2606. 07521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigates the phenomenon of hallucinations in domain-adapted Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on the fine-tuning of the Llama-2 model with the Lamini dataset.
arXiv:2512. 21577v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite numerous attempts at mitigation since the inception of language models, hallucinations remain a persistent problem even in today's frontier LLMs.
arXiv:2601. 11429v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hallucination is a central failure mode of language models (LMs).
arXiv:2607. 20487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to answer questions about political information, including in election-adjacent information settings where factual errors and ideological distortions are high-stakes.
arXiv:2605. 31483v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite Bengali being the sixth most spoken language in the world, no prior work has systematically evaluated hallucination in large language models (LLMs) for Bengali.
arXiv:2604. 14180v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We train a 318M-parameter Transformer language model from scratch on a curated corpus of 1.
arXiv:2605. 05686v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models draw on two knowledge sources: facts baked into weights (parametric memory, PM) and information in context (working memory, WM).
arXiv:2606. 11105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hallucinations, where language models (LMs) generate factually ungrounded responses, pose serious risks, as users tend to blindly rely on them.
arXiv:2608. 13258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-referential prompting has been shown to reliably induce large language models to produce first-person reports resembling subjective experience, but no prior work measures how consistent these reports are across repeated, independent trials, or how that consistency compares to the model's behavior on other kinds of open-ended questions.