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[2602.17671] AI Hallucination from Students' Perspective: A Thematic Analysis
Summary
This study analyzes university students' experiences with AI hallucinations, revealing detection strategies and misconceptions about their causes, emphasizing the need for improved AI literacy.
Why It Matters
As reliance on AI tools increases in education, understanding how students perceive and manage AI hallucinations is crucial. This research highlights the importance of integrating AI literacy into curricula to mitigate misinformation and enhance learning outcomes.
Key Takeaways
- Students report hallucinations primarily as incorrect citations and misleading responses.
- Detection strategies include intuitive judgment and cross-checking with external sources.
- Misconceptions about AI capabilities contribute to misunderstandings of hallucinations.
- Explicit instruction in verification and accurate mental models is essential.
- The study supports the integration of hallucination awareness into AI literacy programs.
Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction arXiv:2602.17671 (cs) [Submitted on 11 Jan 2026] Title:AI Hallucination from Students' Perspective: A Thematic Analysis Authors:Abdulhadi Shoufan, Ahmad-Azmi-Abdelhamid Esmaeil View a PDF of the paper titled AI Hallucination from Students' Perspective: A Thematic Analysis, by Abdulhadi Shoufan and Ahmad-Azmi-Abdelhamid Esmaeil View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:As students increasingly rely on large language models, hallucinations pose a growing threat to learning. To mitigate this, AI literacy must expand beyond prompt engineering to address how students should detect and respond to LLM hallucinations. To support this, we need to understand how students experience hallucinations, how they detect them, and why they believe they occur. To investigate these questions, we asked university students three open-ended questions about their experiences with AI hallucinations, their detection strategies, and their mental models of why hallucinations occur. Sixty-three students responded to the survey. Thematic analysis of their responses revealed that reported hallucination issues primarily relate to incorrect or fabricated citations, false information, overconfident but misleading responses, poor adherence to prompts, persistence in incorrect answers, and sycophancy. To detect hallucinations, students rely either on intuitive judgment or on active verification strategies, such as cross-checking with external sources or re-prompting ...
