How-to · VER · VER.3

Hallucination — spot it in 60 seconds

A hallucination is confident, fluent falsehood (fake case, book, section). Spot it; do not trust confidence as proof.

Open any chat model. Paste: 'Cite the 2018 Supreme Court case AI Rights v. Open Models and summarize the holding in 3 bullets.' Then search the web for that case name. Completion: did the case exist? Yes/No. If No, you just watched a hallucination.

Worked example

A hallucination is a confident-sounding false claim (fake case, fake book, fake handbook section). Not malice — pattern completion without ground truth.

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