Hallucination (AI)

Hallucination (AI)

A confident but factually incorrect or fabricated output produced by an AI system, such as an invented citation, a fictional legal case, or a wrong date presented as fact. Hallucination is not a malfunction in the conventional sense: large language models generate text by predicting statistically likely words, not by checking claims against a database of facts, so fabrication is an inherent risk rather than an occasional bug. (See also: Large language model)