Hallucination

Hallucination is when an AI model generates information that sounds confident and plausible but is actually false, made up, or inaccurate. This happens because AI models are trained to produce likely-sounding text, not to verify facts. They can fabricate statistics, cite non-existent research papers, invent historical events, or confidently give wrong answers to factual questions.

Hallucinations are one of the biggest challenges in AI deployment. They're particularly dangerous in high-stakes domains like healthcare, legal, and finance where incorrect information can have serious consequences. The best defense is combining AI with retrieval systems (RAG), adding explicit "don't make things up" rules to your prompts, and always verifying critical information.