04 / How It Goes Wrong
Hallucination
Wrong, stated confidently. Two kinds: inventing facts outright, and drifting away from material you actually supplied. The second kind is harder to spot and more common.
How you’ll hear it
“It cited a regulation that does not exist.”
“Classic hallucination. Every citation gets checked.”
Avoid
Calling every error a hallucination. Some are simply bad input.
The longer version
A hallucination is confident, fluent, wrong output. Models can invent facts, sources and figures, or drift away from the material they were given. Grounding answers in supplied sources, and checking anything that matters, are the standard defences.