Comment by hughesjj

Agreed that I don't think this particular case is a hallucination, but keep in mind noise can be consistent noise if it's a deterministic process with the same inputs. Same idea of setting a seed for a random number generator.

Even then though I'd be wary of simple changes to the prompt ensuring a different initial variable state, in case some input variation might be 'projected out', either in preprocessing or in one of the intermediate layers.