Hallucination
By HubAI editorial team · Source checked: 24 October 2026What does it mean?
A plausible-looking output that is false, unsupported or not grounded in the supplied material. It can include invented sources, quotations, dates or explanations.
Picture this
An assistant gives a convincing book title and page number that do not exist. The formatting looks scholarly, but the reference cannot be checked.
Where you’ll come across it
Discussing reliability and designing review steps. Check consequential claims against original material and give systems a clear way to say that the evidence is missing.
What it doesn’t mean
Confidence of tone is not evidence. Retrieval and citations can help, but a real link still needs to support the particular claim being made.
Give it permission to say “not in the notes”
A short exercise · use fictional or non-sensitive material.
- Make up three product facts, leaving out the launch date.
- Ask for a short announcement using only those notes and explicitly ask it to flag missing details.
- Check that it leaves the date unknown rather than inventing one. Repeat with a different missing fact.
Did it actually recognise the gap, rather than attach a disclaimer to a made-up answer?
Did that make it clearer?
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Written and explained by HubAI. The reference below lets you go deeper; it is not an endorsement of a particular product.
Technical reference: developers.google.com ↗