Glossary Terms

AI hallucination

An AI hallucination is a confident, fluent, entirely invented answer. The model is not lying, because it has no notion of true or false. It is producing the most plausible continuation of your question, and a plausible answer sometimes contains a source that does not exist, a quotation nobody said, or a date that never happened. Hallucinations cluster where real information is thin: obscure topics, recent events, and specific names and numbers. The defence is to stop reading tone as evidence. Fluency is not accuracy, and the more specific a claim is, the more it is worth checking.