What is an AI hallucination?
An AI hallucination is an answer from an AI model that sounds confident but is false or made up, such as an invented price, a policy that doesn't exist or a link that goes nowhere. It happens because language models predict likely text rather than check facts.
Also called: chatbot hallucination, LLM hallucination, confabulation.
By Santhul Joseph, AI EngineerUpdated
Why AI models hallucinate
A language model writes the most likely next words. When the answer is in the material it was given, likely and true line up. When it isn't, the model can still produce something that reads like an answer.
Ask a general model "do you deliver on Sundays?" without any delivery information, and it may say yes, simply because many shops do.
What it costs a business
- A customer acts on a wrong price, a wrong opening time or a refund you never offered.
- Trust drops after one bad answer, and customers stop asking the bot.
- Your team spends time correcting what the bot said.
- In fields like healthcare or finance, a wrong answer can have real consequences.
How SimplyBoost handles it
The SimplyBoost agent answers from your knowledge: your website pages, documents and Q&A pairs. Questions it could not answer are collected under Missing answers, so you can add the answer and the agent uses it from then on. When it can't help, or couldn't answer twice in a row, it hands the conversation to your team.
Every plan can learn from every source type, with files up to 50 MB and no limit on the number of files, so you can give the agent everything it needs instead of picking which documents fit your plan.
Questions people ask
Can AI hallucinations be prevented completely?
No tool can honestly promise zero. What keeps them rare is answering from your own content, keeping that content complete, and handing over to a person when the agent can't help.
How do I find out where my chatbot lacks information?
Look at the questions it couldn't answer. In SimplyBoost they are collected under Missing answers, and each answer you add there is used from then on.
Is a hallucination a bug?
Not quite. A bug is a fault in code. A hallucination is the model doing what it was built to do, writing likely text, without the facts that would make it true.