# Machine Mirages: Defining the Undefined

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13990 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13990/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Hallucination in Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05922/) (2023)
- [Hallucination-Free? Assessing the Reliability of Leading AI Legal Research Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20362/) (2024)
- [HalluLens: LLM Hallucination Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17550/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Hallucination in Large Language Models based on Unanswerable Math Word Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03558/) (2024)
- [AI Hallucinations: A Misnomer Worth Clarifying](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06796/) (2024)
- [HALoGEN: Fantastic LLM Hallucinations and Where to Find Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08292/) (2025)
- [FaithBench: A Diverse Hallucination Benchmark for Summarization by Modern LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13210/) (2024)
- [Estimating the Hallucination Rate of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07457/) (2024)
- [LongHalQA: Long-Context Hallucination Evaluation for MultiModal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09962/) (2024)
- [Memory Helps, but Confabulation Misleads: Understanding Streaming Events in Videos with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15457/) (2025)
- [Machine Intelligence in Africa: a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02218/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As multimodal machine intelligence systems started achieving average animal-level and average human-level fluency in many measurable tasks in processing images, language, and sound, they began to exhibit a new class of cognitive aberrations: machine mirages. These include delusion, illusion, confabulation, hallucination, misattribution error, semantic drift, semantic compression, exaggeration, causal inference failure, uncanny valley of perception, bluffing-patter-bullshitting, cognitive stereotypy, pragmatic misunderstanding, hypersignification, semantic reheating-warming, simulated authority effect, fallacious abductive leap, contextual drift, referential hallucination, semiotic Frankenstein effect, calibration failure, spurious correlation, bias amplification, concept drift sensitivity, misclassification under uncertainty, adversarial vulnerability, overfitting, prosodic misclassification, accent bias, turn boundary failure, semantic boundary confusion, noise overfitting, latency-induced decision drift, ambiguity collapse and other forms of error that mimic but do not replicate human or animal fallibility. This article presents some of the errors and argues that these failures must be explicitly defined and systematically assessed. Understanding machine mirages is essential not only for improving machine intelligence reliability but also for constructing a multiscale ethical, co-evolving intelligence ecosystem that respects the diverse forms of life, cognition, and expression it will inevitably touch.