What is Hallucination?

Explained

Hallucination occurs when an LLM produces plausible-sounding but false or fabricated information. RAG, grounding, and confidence scoring help reduce hallucinations in production systems.

Decision guides that use this term

• RAG vs fine-tuning: which one does your enterprise use case need?
• RAG vs enterprise search: do your people need answers or documents?

Further reading

• Taming LLM Hallucinations: A Confidence-Driven Approach for Accurate Customer Experiences

Related terms

• Grounding Anchoring model responses in verifiable sources (documents, data).
• LLM Model trained on vast text; basis of ChatGPT, Claude, and similar systems.
• Production Environment where the model serves real users (vs. development/testing).
• RAG Retrieve relevant documents and use them as context to generate the answer.
• Agent Agenda The agent’s live plan: ordered steps, open subtasks, and checkpoints toward a goal.
• Agent Planner Component or prompt pattern that proposes multi-step plans before tools run.