5 signs that ChatGPT is hallucinating

Hallucinations are an intrinsic flaw in AI chatbots. When ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or other AI models deliver wrong information, no matter how confidently, that's a hallucination. The AI might hallucinate a slight deviation, an innocuous-seeming slip‑up, or commit to an outright libelous and entirely fabricated accusation. Regardless, they are inevitably going to appear if you engage with ChatGPT or its rivals for long enough.

Understanding how and why ChatGPT can trip over the difference between plausible and true is crucial for anyone who wants to talk to the AI. Because these systems generate responses by predicting what text should come next based on patterns in training data rather than verifying against a ground truth, they can sound convincingly real while being completely made up. The trick is to be aware that a hallucination might appear at any moment, and to look for clues that one ...