Is it? I’ve seen AI hallucinations, but they seem to be increasingly rare these days.

Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone could put anything on there, and therefore it was unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail.

20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may have its shortcomings, and yet it is still the most impressive, useful advancement in human knowledge transfer in a generation.

It is! But you can then verify it via a correct, conventional forward dictionary.

The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy to check correctness...

Sure, but it's easy to check if it's incorrect and try again.