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What Are AI Hallucinations — And Why Do They Happen?

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    Rahul
    Twitter

If you've ever used ChatGPT (or any AI assistant) and it confidently gave you an answer that sounded legit but turned out to be totally wrong… congrats! You've met your first AI hallucination.

No, it's not the AI tripping out. But it is the AI making stuff up — and that’s a problem worth understanding.

AI Hallucinations

What Is an AI Hallucination?

An AI hallucination happens when a language model (like ChatGPT) generates responses that are factually incorrect, logically inconsistent, or entirely fabricated, even though they sound perfectly plausible.

Think of it like a super-smart friend who sounds really confident — but sometimes just makes things up to fill in the blanks.

Here are a few common examples:

  1. Making up fake citations or authors

  2. Confidently giving wrong historical facts

  3. “Inventing” quotes that no one ever said

  4. Incorrectly summarizing documents

  5. Giving outdated or fictional code snippets

Why Does This Happen?

AI models don’t “know” facts the way humans do. Instead, they’re trained to predict the next word in a sentence based on patterns in vast amounts of text data.

They don’t understand truth — they understand likelihood.

So when they don’t have the exact answer, or when a prompt is ambiguous, they can “hallucinate” something that sounds likely, even if it’s wrong. It's not intentional — it’s just how they work.

Why Should You Care?

Because you probably rely on AI tools for research, writing, coding, or content creation. And if you’re not careful, hallucinations can sneak into your work and damage credibility.

  1. That’s why it's important to:

  2. Double-check critical facts

  3. Use reputable sources for verification

  4. Ask clarifying follow-up questions when something seems off