confabulation

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   A casual conversation; a chat.

   […] Mrs Grantly was preparing herself for a grand attack which she was to make on her father, as agreed upon between herself and her husband during their curtain confabulation of that morning.

2. 2
   noun

   A fabricated memory believed to be true, especially in someone with dementia or with encephalopathy from advanced alcoholism.

   For Örulv and Hydén, confabulation is ‘world-making’ (669). What the person with AD chooses to enunciate, ‘may capture something important in the way the person makes sense of his or her life and also make meaning-based connections’ (Hydén and Örulv 2009: 206).

3. 3
   noun

   (psychiatry) a plausible but imagined memory that fills in gaps in what is remembered

4. 4
   noun

   an informal conversation

5. 5
   noun

   An assertion, statement, or text generated by a generative AI that is presented by that AI as if it were true but is in fact a made-up, false notion.

Etymology

From Middle English confabulacion (“conversation”), from Latin confābulātiōnem, from cōnfābulārī + -tiōnem.