Hallucination

A fluent, confident answer that is false or not supported by the sources.

Models generate likely text, not checked facts. They invent citations, APIs, numbers and names, especially when asked about things they cannot know. Grounding in sources, asking for quotes and allowing “I do not know” all reduce it; none removes it.

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Related terms

RAG (retrieval-augmented generation): Finding relevant documents first and putting them into the prompt, so the model answers from them.
Evals: A repeatable test set that scores an AI feature, so changes can be measured instead of guessed.
Structured outputs: The model’s answer is constrained to match a JSON schema you provide.

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