What is Hallucination?
- Hallucination
- A hallucination is a confident statement produced by a language model that no source supports, ranging from an invented figure to a wrong description of what a company sells. Hallucinations happen because a model generates the most plausible continuation of text rather than looking a fact up, so a gap in what the model holds gets filled with something that reads correct.
01 In practice
Thin entity data makes a brand a likelier subject of one. A model asked about an organisation it holds almost nothing about still produces an answer, and the material it draws on is whatever it has for organisations of that shape: a plausible service list, a plausible location, a plausible history, none of it from the business.
Conflation is the version that does the most damage. Two companies sharing a name, or one company described inconsistently across its own pages and profiles, give a model no basis to keep them apart, so facts belonging to one arrive attached to the other.
The defence is mechanical rather than rhetorical. Stating the facts plainly on a page a retrieval agent can fetch, declaring the organisation as an entity with a stable identifier, and corroborating that identity with sameAs links gives a grounded answer something to use instead of a guess.
02 Related terms
The terms next to this one.
The work behind it
Tell the models what you are.
Markup that tells models what your business is, on pages that render without JavaScript.