Machine Mirages: Defining the Undefined

Abstract: 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.