Hallucination
confabulation, making things up, fabrication
In one sentence
A confident, plausible-sounding output that is simply untrue, and a consequence of producing likely text rather than a bug waiting for a patch.
Why it matters
A model holds no separate store of facts to check itself against. It is producing likely text, and a fabricated citation looks exactly like a real one: same shape, same confidence. That is why hallucination is a property of the mechanism rather than a bug awaiting a patch, and why grounding an answer in retrieved documents with a link back beats asking the model to be careful.
Sources
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