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COMPEL Glossary / confabulation

Confabulation

NIST's preferred term for hallucination: an LLM generating fluent output that is unsupported by ground truth.

What this means in practice

Preferred over "hallucination" because it avoids anthropomorphising the model and names the specific failure — fabricating coherent content rather than misperceiving stimuli.

Synonyms

hallucination , LLM fabrication

See also

  • Grounding — Grounding refers to techniques that connect AI model outputs to factual, verifiable information sources rather than relying solely on patterns learned during training.
  • Evaluation harness — The infrastructure that runs capability, regression, safety, and human-review evaluations on an LLM feature on a defined cadence.

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