AI glossary · Generative AI and LLMs
AI hallucination
An AI hallucination is when an AI confidently gives an answer that is false or made up, such as a fake fact, quote or source.
Also called hallucination, confabulation
In more detail
Hallucinations happen because a large language model predicts plausible-sounding text rather than checking facts. If it doesn’t know something, it may still produce a fluent answer.
They are less common in newer models and in tools that use grounding or retrieval-augmented generation, but no AI is free of them. Check important details, especially names, numbers, quotes, legal or medical information and citations.
Example
A chatbot lists three research papers to support its answer, but one of them doesn’t exist.
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