AI Hallucination
What is AI Hallucination?
An AI hallucination is an answer from a generative AI model that is fluent and confident but factually wrong, unsupported or invented, such as a policy that does not exist or a made-up order status.
Hallucinations happen because a language model generates the most likely-sounding text rather than looking facts up. They are more likely when the model is asked about something it was not given information on, when instructions are vague, or when it is pushed to answer rather than allowed to say it does not know.
In a contact center a hallucinated answer can mislead a customer, create a compliance problem or generate repeat contacts. Common defenses are grounding answers in approved content (retrieval-augmented generation), instructing the model to decline when the source does not cover the question, showing agents the source behind each suggestion, testing against real questions before launch, and keeping a person in the loop where the consequences of a wrong answer are high.
Related: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Grounding, AI guardrails.