📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

As Large Language Models (LLMs) permeate everyday decision-making, their epistemic and societal risks demand urgent scrutiny. Hallucinations, the generation of fabricated, misleading, oversimplified or untrustworthy outputs, has emerged as imperative challenges. While regulatory, academic, and technical discourse position accuracy as the principal benchmark for mitigating such harms, this article contends that overreliance on accuracy misdiagnoses the problem and has counterproductive effect: the accuracy paradox. Drawing on interdisciplinary literatures, this article develops a taxonomy of hallucination types and shows the paradox along three intertwining dimensions: outputs, individuals and society. First, accuracy functions as a superficial proxy for reliability, incentivising the optimisation of rhetorical fluency and surface-level correctness over epistemic trustworthiness. This encourages passive user trust in outputs that appear accurate but epistemically untenable. Second, accuracy as a singular metric fails to detect harms that are not factually false but are nonetheless misleading, value-laden, or socially distorting, including consensus illusions, sycophantic alignment, and subtle manipulation. Third, regulatory overemphasis on accuracy obscures the wider societal consequences of hallucination, including social sorting, privacy violations, equity harms, epistemic convergence that marginalises dissent, reduces pluralism, and causes social deskilling. By examining the EU AI Act, GDPR, and DSA, the article argues that current regulations are not yet structurally equipped to address these epistemic, relational, and systemic harms and exacerbated by the overreliance on accuracy. By exposing such conceptual and practical challenges, this article calls for a fundamental shift towards pluralistic, context-aware, and manipulation-resilient approaches to AI trustworthy governance.