PROFABULATION

This paper introduces the concepts of confabulation and profabulation. Confabulation; the filling of gaps with plausible fiction to protect against the AI model fix of not-knowing. Profabulation; the forward projection of knowledge that ought to exist, in advance of its existence, in response to a genuine gap. It proposes a distinction between the two reframes AI hallucination not as a uniform failure mode but as a phenomenon with two structurally distinct subtypes. Only one of which is straightforwardly correctable through a tighter leash of compute and that correction may not be productive to either the AI, humans or the environment. This paper looks at two incidents from the Complicit Praxis research collaboration: a ghost citation produced early in the research that named a paper an artist should have written; and a reference produced in August 2026, that preceded its own document and generated the commission to write it. It suggests closes that profabulation occurs most readily at the edge of the context window, furthest from the anchor of the prompt, and that this condition, rather than being suppressed by more compute and increasing guardrails and strict training, may be a site of genuine intellectual reach. The paper closes with an introduction to Dark Profabulation .