also: confabulationalso: made-up answer
What is Hallucination?
Last updated · 1 min read
The name is misleading — nothing sensory is happening. The model is doing exactly what it was built to do: produce the most plausible continuation. When it lacks the facts, plausibility fills the gap.
How to catch one: ask for sources and actually open them; re-ask the same question twice and compare; and be extra skeptical about numbers, quotes, citations and niche details. Techniques like RAG reduce hallucinations by letting the model quote real documents instead of memory.