AI and automation
Hallucination
A hallucination is a confident, fluent, and false statement produced by an AI, typically when it has no source for the answer but produces one anyway.
Also calledAI hallucinationconfabulation
In customer messaging it is expensive: an invented delivery date or an invented refund policy becomes a promise the business has to honour or retract. Grounding reduces it, showing sources on a draft exposes it, and handing off when retrieval finds nothing avoids it. A system that always produces an answer will sometimes produce this one.
More in AI and automation
Worth knowing alongside it.
- Grounding
- Grounding is the practice of making an AI answer from specific source material you supplied, rather than from whatever it absorbed during training.
- Knowledge base
- A knowledge base is the collection of documents, web pages, and written answers a business gives an AI so that its replies come from the business's own information.
- Human handoff
- Human handoff is the point at which an automated conversation is passed to a person, along with the full context of what has been said so far.
- Approval gate
- An approval gate is a control that holds an outbound action until a person reviews and approves it.