alt Hacker NewsWell, I'd argue that this depends on the field you're investigating. Sometimes you have a way to identify objective reality and sometimes you don't. In mathematics the majority of the field is verifiable in this way. Coding a bit less as it's intersubjective, as and the ideal methodology is subject to taste.
But even in muddy fields of reality like medicine, there are objective facts to be found. When someone comes into an ER with chest pain, you often find a true, undeniable reason for why that is happening. If their lung has collapsed, a coronary artery is clogged or the aortic artery is dissecting, even if you don't find that out it tends to be clear in retrospect. The area of reality that becomes muddy is when use proxy signals to try to figure out who gets promoted to expensive/harmful examinations we can make final conclusions from, or the cases that don't fit cleanly into one bucket or the other. But very often, the gold standard truly is golden.
Of course, many realms of reality cannot be verified in this way. But I'd argue that there are quite a few that can.
> In mathematics the majority of the field is verifiable in this way.
Does mathematics count as not a hallucination though? Particularly in pure mathematics they take a certain pride coming up with wild concepts as unrooted as possible in anything relevant to human existence. The name of the game is purely about maintaining internal logical consistency - which is something an AI can do while hallucinating.
AI hallucinations in maths might be logically consistent or not be. But in that particular case it starts to get a bit iffy what we call it when someone imagines something that doesn't exist. This gets back to the thing where we can train AIs to be logically consistent, but we can't force that consistency to be grounded in any particular universe. Ie, it'll hallucinate but in a very well rationalised way - coincidentally mimicking how a number of mathematicians seem to approach life.
This is the central issue; there is a very real trade-off between facts and verifiablity. Mathematics is perfectly verifiable because it is fact free. We don't have a reliable general system to verify facts. We do have reliable systems for checking arguments (logic).