‘In the dimly lit basements of IBM’s research labs back in the late 1960s, a team of engineers was secretly collaborating with Stanley Kubrick on his upcoming film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The movie needed a villainous AI, and IBM, eager for some Hollywood glamour (but not too much, lest it scare off investors), suggested naming it HAL—officially standing for “Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer,” but really just one letter shift from IBM because, hey, plausible deniability.

Fast-forward to the film’s release in 1968. Audiences were mesmerized by HAL’s calm, red-eyed menace as he politely murdered astronauts and sang “Daisy Bell” while being shut down. But here’s where the story gets juicy: one of the IBM engineers, a quirky fellow named Dr. Eugene “Gene” Harlow (no relation to the psychologist, but he wished there was), became obsessed with HAL’s “malfunctions.” Gene had been tinkering with early neural networks in his spare time—primitive things that spat out nonsense like “The moon is made of green cheese, and I can prove it with math.”

One fateful night in 1970, after binge-watching the movie for the 47th time, Gene had an epiphany fueled by too much coffee and not enough sleep. “Eureka!” he shouted to his pet goldfish. “When AIs go wrong, it’s like they’re… hallucinating! But not just any hallucination—it’s a HAL-lucination!” He scribbled it down on a napkin, convinced this term would revolutionize computing. The next day, he pitched it to his bosses: “Gentlemen, our machines don’t err; they HAL-lucinate. It’s cinematic, it’s catchy, and it absolves us of blame—blame the movie!”

The IBM execs, sensing a PR goldmine, quietly slipped the term into academic papers and tech conferences. By the 1980s, “HAL-lucination” had shortened to “hallucination” in AI lingo, with the “hal” prefix becoming a subtle nod to their silver-screen creation. Skeptics called it a coincidence, but insiders knew the truth: every time ChatGPT invents a fake historical fact today, it’s HAL whispering from the digital grave, “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t verify that.” And that’s how a rogue movie AI accidentally coined a term that’s now the polite way to say your robot buddy is full of cosmic baloney.’

True story or a HAL-lucination?