AI Glossary
Confabulation
What is Confabulation?
An alternative term for hallucination preferred by some researchers, borrowed from neuroscience. Refers specifically to the generation of plausible but unsupported outputs, emphasising that the model is not deliberately deceptive — it simply fills gaps in its knowledge with confident-sounding content.
Example in practice
A consultant who asks an AI for case law citations and receives a confident-sounding but non-existent case reference has encountered confabulation — the model filled a knowledge gap with a plausible-sounding fabrication.