Hallucination Chains

One of the most common baiting methods on the internet is taking a famous but not too famous film, posting a scene from it, and asking (as if you don’t know the name of the film you just ripped, cut, and posted) if anyone knows where the scene is from. This is how people make money in year of our lord 2025, creating little opportunities for people online to show how smart they are while the poster rakes in the clout.

The game has changed a bit though because now people in the comments just ask Grok — though with not always great results:

Even if you don’t know this movie is King of New York and it’s from 1990, you probably know that Christopher Walken does not look like this in 2025.

I got curious though about Grok’s mistake. It seemed a weird misread of the title of the film. King of Newark 3 exists, and has (as noted) similar themes but I’m not sure that Newark is known for a robust subway system. Was this a legitimate misread based on a similar subway scene, or (as was more likely) a hallucination produced by trying to justify a movie name misfire?

So I Googled to see if King of Newark 3 (an indie film with such a small following that there is no Rotten Tomatoes page on it) had a subway scene. And the answer I got was not great.

Citing Grok, AI Overview does a very light rewrite of the Grok response. Unfortunately, so did AI Mode:

I’m not a believer in the whole AI synthetic collapse thing, but I think there’s plenty of examples that while not full collapse can make the internet suck more. This pattern has probably been named by someone else already, but because it’s my day off and I’m feeling lazy I’ll call it “Hallucination Chains”. We should really try to avoid it.