Hallucination

An AI hallucination is a made-up fact, source, quote or detail delivered in exactly the same polished tone as the true bits. It does not blush or look shifty. It hands you a fictional road and says the hospital is at the end of it. The model is not lying in the human sense; lying requires knowing what is true and choosing otherwise, and an LLM is generating the most plausible next pattern, which sometimes arrives wearing a name badge marked FACT. Funny when it introduces an imaginary granny into a family story, less adorable in medicine, law, finance or a school assignment that now cites a journal invented five seconds ago. The remedy is not to ask for more confidence. Give it sources, require evidence, check the important claims and keep a person answerable for the result.