hallucination

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the tendency of large language models to generate text that is factually incorrect, internally inconsistent, or entirely fabricated while presenting it with the same apparent confidence as accurate information; AI hallucinations arise from the statistical nature of language model training, which optimises for plausible-sounding text rather than factual accuracy, and are a significant barrier to deploying LLMs in high-stakes domains such as medicine, law, and finance; mitigation strategies include retrieval-augmented generation, chain-of-thought prompting, constitutional AI training, and grounding models with access to verified knowledge bases