AI models make stuff up. How can hallucinations be controlled?

It is an increasingly familiar experience. A request for help to a large language model (LLM) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT is promptly met by a response that is confident, coherent and just plain wrong. In an AI model, such tendencies are usually described as hallucinations. A more informal word exists, however: these are the qualities of a great bullshitter.

There are kinder ways to put it. In its instructions to users, OpenAI warns that ChatGPT “can make mistakes”. Anthropic, an American AI company, says that its LLM Claude “may display incorrect or harmful information”; Google’s Gemini warns users to “double-check its responses”. The throughline is this: no matter how fluent and confident AI-generated text sounds, it still cannot be trusted.