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Glossary

Hallucination

A hallucination is when an AI model produces confident output that is factually wrong or unsupported — inventing a fact, source, or detail that is not grounded in real data.


Hallucination is the central reliability risk for enterprise AI. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) reduces it by grounding answers in retrieved evidence, but does not eliminate it: the model can still misread context or answer from memory when retrieval misses.

Mitigations include requiring citations, designing the system to say 'I don't know,' and evaluating faithfulness — whether an answer actually follows from its sources.

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