The term “hallucination” is a projection of inappropriate expectations onto a program. We know that LLMs are not “truth machines,” but we really want them to be. So when they produce a result that happens not to match external reality - which, it should be noted, LLMs don’t generally have access to - we call it an hallucination.

“Bugs” are completely different. With bugs, we have a clear specification and we have a program that’s supposed to meet that specification. If it doesn’t, we say the program has bugs, and if it’s important enough we can change the program to eliminate the bugs.

You can try to apply similar logic to LLMs, but you’d be making a category error, and you’ll fail to get the results you want in general. It’s not the same thing at all.

If anything, the concept of an LLM hallucination is a bug in human understanding of LLMs.