Glossary
What is hallucination?
A confident AI answer that is not supported by any real source.
Language models predict plausible text. When they lack the facts, plausible text is still produced, which is why invented citations look so convincing.
The risk rises sharply for recent events, niche products, version-specific behaviour and anything behind a login.
Supplying the actual pages and asking the model to say when something is absent is the most reliable mitigation available to an ordinary user.
In practice
Ask about a pricing tier that changed last month and an ungrounded assistant will happily quote the old one.
Common questions
- What does hallucination mean in one sentence?
- A confident AI answer that is not supported by any real source.
- Why does hallucination matter when you use Claude or ChatGPT?
- Supplying the actual pages and asking the model to say when something is absent is the most reliable mitigation available to an ordinary user.
- Can you give an example of hallucination?
- Ask about a pricing tier that changed last month and an ungrounded assistant will happily quote the old one.
Related terms
- GroundingTying an AI answer to specific source material you supplied.
- Retrieval-augmented generationFetching relevant documents and adding them to the prompt before the model answers.
- Knowledge cutoffThe date after which a model has no training knowledge.
- Glossary indexEvery AI context term, defined in plain language.
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