one sentence answer
Hallucination is often translated as AI hallucination. It refers to AI making up non-existent information, wrong quotes, wrong dates, wrong relationships between people, or stating uncertain things with certainty.
why it happens
Large language models are good at predicting and generating language, but they don't naturally know whether every sentence is true. Hallucinations are more likely to occur when there is insufficient information, when the question is too vague, when the request is too certain, or when it involves the latest events.
high risk scenario
Legal, medical and financial
These are areas where the cost of error is too high to rely solely on AI answers.
Quotes and data
AI may make up studies, links, page numbers, or statistics that don’t exist.
Company Policies and Product Pricing
This kind of information changes frequently, so you need to check the official website or internal information.
How to Reduce Hallucinations
Give the AI a clear source of data and ask it to distinguish between "determinable based on the data" and "needs further verification." If it’s something important, ask the AI to come up with a checklist instead of just giving you the final answer.
continue learning
RAG can reduce hallucinations by retrieving specified data, but still requires a human to judge the quality of the data.