The Hallucinated Subjects: Gender, Coherence, and the Ontological Politics of Generative AI

Generative AI systems do not merely hallucinate facts. They increasingly hallucinate subjects. This articledevelops a queer and technofeminist account of generative AI hallucination as ontological subjectproduction, a political infrastructure of subjectivity disguised as mere technical error. While hallucinationis conventionally described as “plausible yet non‑factual content,” a deeper function is the fabrication ofsubjects along normative regimes: intelligible only insofar as they conform to norms of genderedcoherence, and materially produced through extractivist data and labor regimes. This article introducestwo interlocking concepts through which this operates: (a) the hallucinated human subject, the statisticallyassembled gure of personhood that generative systems construct as a “you” from users’ digital traces;and (b) the hallucinated machinic subject, the synthetic speaking position through which AI presents itselfas a coherent “I.” Drawing on Preciado’s pharmacopornographic regime, Butler’s performativity, andAlthusser’s interpellation, this article argues that these two gures recursively stabilize one another,producing closed circuits of gendered intelligibility in which contradiction is compressed, queerness iscorrected, and normative coherence is enforced at scale. This dynamic is traced across three sites: thealgorithmic construction of the dataed human double, the constitutional training of the machinicpersona, and the recursive feedback loop through which each gure stabilizes the other. Hallucinatedsubjects are experienced as real, and the gendered categories they reinforce are already being written intothe next generation of governance and surveillance systems. Because hallucination is not a technical awto be corrected, but a political infrastructure of subjectivation that enforces (gendered) coherence, queerrefusals and glitches that trouble prediction become a crucial site of resistance.