Hallucination
Also called confabulation, fabrication.
Hallucination is generated content that is fluent and plausible but unfaithful to the provided source or factually incorrect, such as fabricated citations, facts, or quotations.
Description
Surveys distinguish intrinsic hallucination, which contradicts the source, from extrinsic hallucination, which cannot be verified from it. Mitigations include retrieval-augmented generation, verification methods such as chain-of-verification, allowing the model to say it does not know, and requiring quotes from supplied documents.
Sources
- Ji et al. (2022). Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation.
Cite this entry
Protologue. (2026). Hallucination. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0096). https://protologue.com/t/hallucination/
BibTeX
@misc{protologue_hallucination,
title = {Hallucination},
author = {{Protologue}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.0.0},
note = {Entry PTL-0096},
url = {https://protologue.com/t/hallucination/}
}