machinic schizoanalysis of AI hallucination and the conditions of a line of flight - Nature

Download PDF Abstract The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has intensified debate over so-called AI hallucinations: fluent outputs that are factually unsupported, logically unstable, or misaligned with a task. Mainstream engineering treats these outputs as failures to be reduced through post-training, retrieval, verification, and other control mechanisms. This article reinterprets that consensus through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia. It reads alignment as a reterritorializing apparatus and uses “schizo-syntax” for a non-clinical textual pattern of branching association under weaker referential constraint. The argument does not equate randomness, high temperature, base models, or factual error with creativity. A deviation is productively deterritorializing only when it creates context-relevant novelty, retains intelligible task constraints, and is taken up through human interpretation, selection, or verification; novelty without those conditions is noise. Published studies of literary interpretation and AI-assisted art illustrate this relational account, while the article reports no new experiment. A preregistrable comparison of matched base and instruction-tuned checkpoints, decoding settings, and creative, interpretive, and factual tasks is therefore specified as a future test. Finally, the article treats “desire,” “unconscious,” “paranoiac,” and “line of flight” as functional metaphors for an input → learned causal-functional organization → output sequence, not as attributions of consciousness, psychiatric states, intention, or autonomous authorship. The result is a plural account that preserves strict factual regimes where truth matters while identifying a bounded role for generative deviation in creative and exploratory practice. Explore related subjects Discover the latest articles and news in related subjects. Neuroscience Psychology Author information Authors and Affiliations Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Zihang Lan, Azirah Hashim & Murad Abdu Saeed Authors Zihang Lan View author publications Search author on: PubMed Google Scholar Azirah Hashim View author publications Search author on: PubMed Google Scholar Murad Abdu Saeed View author publications Search author on: PubMed Google Scholar Corresponding author Correspondence to Murad Abdu Saeed . Ethics declarations Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests. Ethical approval This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. Informed consent This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. Additional information Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Supplementary information Supplementary information (download DOCX ) Rights and permissions Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ . Reprints and permissions About this article Cite this article Lan, Z., Hashim, A. & Abdu Saeed, M. Schizo-syntax and the paranoiac guardrail: machinic schizoanalysis of AI hallucination and the conditions of a line of flight. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-08814-4 Download citation Received : 02 April 2026 Accepted : 14 August 2026 Published : 29 August 2026 DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-08814-4 Share this article Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Get shareable link Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Copy shareable link to clipboard Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative