The surprising reason ChatGPT and other AI tools make things up – and why it’s not just a glitch

image via TechRadar

March 21, 2025, 2:24 PM

• •LLMs don't retrieve facts like a search engine or a human looking something up in a database.
• •LLMs lack an internal fact-checking mechanism, and because their goal is to predict the next token [unit of text], they sometimes prefer lucid-sounding token sequences over correct ones.
• •Rather than admitting uncertainty, many AI tools default to producing an answer – whether it's right or not.

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have wowed the world with their capabilities. But they've also made headlines for confidently spewing absolute nonsense. This phenomenon, known as hallucination, ranges from fairly harmless mistakes – like getting the number of ‘r’s in strawberry wrong – to completely fabricated legal cases that have landed lawyers in serious trouble.

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