Why AI Hallucinates and How to Reduce It

A hallucination is a confident answer that is simply wrong. It happens because the model is built to produce likely text, not to check facts.

Why It Happens

Gaps in training data, vague prompts and pressure to always answer all push the model toward inventing details.

How to Reduce It

Ground answers in your own documents with retrieval, ask for sources, lower the temperature, and give the model permission to say it does not know.

Always Verify

For anything important, treat the output as a draft and check names, numbers and citations yourself.