Use It Wisely
When AI Gets It Wrong
6 min+50 XPStep 1/9
Hallucination: the official word for 'made it up'
A hallucination is when AI states something false with total confidence — a fake court case, a wrong date, a book that doesn't exist, a statistic nobody measured.
It's not a glitch you can patch out. It's the direct consequence of how these systems work: they predict plausible text, and sometimes plausible ≠ true.
insight
Famous real case: lawyers submitted a brief citing six court cases that didn't exist — the AI had invented plausible-looking citations. They were fined. The lesson isn't 'AI bad' — it's 'verify before stakes.'