Dictionary.com chooses ‘hallucinate’ as 2023’s Word of the Year: Why?

(NEXSTAR) – Dictionary.com has chosen “hallucinate” as its 2023 Word of the Year, but not in its traditional, trippy sense.

Instead, Dictionary.com is highlighting the word’s increased usage among users and critics of artificial intelligence (AI) programs, who have adopted the term to describe the inaccurate and often outlandish outputs that chatbots and other prompt-based AI programs attempt to present as fact.

Specifically, Dictionary.com’s latest definition of “hallucinate” reads as follows:

Computers, Digital Technology. (of a machine learning program) to produce false information contrary to the intent of the user and present it as if true and factual.

Dictionary.com

Popular AI chatbot programs can sometimes fall victim to these hallucinations, unintentionally sharing falsehoods with users. But hallucinations can also affect computer vision tools, which aim to assess and make recommendations based on visual data, IBM explains.

“For example, a healthcare AI model might incorrectly identify a benign skin lesion as malignant, leading to unnecessary medical interventions,” the company writes.

Hallucinations can also contribute to the spread of inaccurate or even prejudiced articles or research results, depending on where the programs are pulling information from.

Leaders in the AI field are optimistic that “hallucinations” will become fewer and further between in time, but others aren’t so sure they’ll ever reach a stage where fact-checking is no longer necessary, the Associated Press recently reported.

“Even if they can be tuned to be right more of the time, they will still have failure modes — and likely the failures will be in the cases where it’s harder for a person reading the text to notice, because they are more obscure,” Emily Bender, a linguistics professor and director of the University of Washington’s Computational Linguistics Laboratory, told the outlet this year.

The term “hallucinate,” in the AI sense, doesn’t appear to be going anywhere either, according to Dictionary.com. The editors or the site say there’s been a significant increase (46%) in the number of users looking up its latest definition of “hallucinate” in 2023.

“Hallucinate as our 2023 Word of the Year encapsulates technology’s continuing impact on social change, and the continued discrepancy between the perfect future we envision and the messy one we actually achieve,” said Grant Barrett, the head of lexicography at Dictionary.com.