‘Hallucinate’ chosen as Cambridge dictionary’s word of the year

‘It’s so easy to anthropomorphise these systems’ … large language model AIs are notorious for ‘hallucinating’ false information. Photograph: Andrew Ostrovsky/Alamy

Cambridge dictionary’s word of the year for 2023 is “hallucinate” – a verb that gained an additional meaning this year.

The original definition of the chosen word is to “seem to see, hear, feel, or smell” something that does not exist, usually because of “a health condition or because you have taken a drug”. It now has an additional meaning, relating to when artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT, which generates text that mimics human writing, “hallucinates” and produces false information.