Cambridge Dictionary Picks 'Hallucinate' As 2023 Word Of The Year

Cambridge Dictionary has declared "hallucinate" as the word of the year for 2023 and also updated its meaning related to artificial intelligence.

The original definition of the 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 has now acquired an extra meaning, in reference to instances where artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, which create text resembling human writing, "hallucinate" and generate inaccurate information.

The word was chosen because the new meaning “gets to the heart of why people are talking about AI”, according to a post on the dictionary site.

The dictionary also added a number of AI-related entries this year, including large language model (or LLM), generative AI (or GenAI), and GPT (an abbreviation of Generative Pre-trained Transformer).