Why does AI make things up, and how do you check its answers?

Why hallucinations happen

A large language model learns patterns from huge amounts of text and then predicts, word by word, what is likely to come next. It has no built-in step that checks a sentence against reality. If the right answer was common in its training data, the likely answer and the true answer usually match. If the question is about something rare, recent or private, such as your own customers or last week's prices, the model still produces the most plausible-sounding text.

A few things make this worse: a question that assumes something false, a request for a precise number the model cannot know, knowledge that stops at the model's training cutoff, and prompts that reward a confident answer more than an honest «I do not know».

Which answers are most at risk

• Exact figures: prices, totals, percentages, dates.
• Names of people, companies and products, and who said what.
• Sources: citations, links, laws, article numbers and court cases.
• Anything about your own business the model has not been shown.

How to check AI answers

• Give it the facts. Answers based on your records or documents are far more reliable than answers from memory.
• Ask where each number comes from, and open that record or page yourself.
• Allow «I do not know» in your question, so a guess is not the only way to answer.
• Check the risky parts first: figures, names, dates and quotes.
• Treat legal, tax and medical statements as a starting point and confirm them with the official source or a professional.

A small example

You ask a general chatbot which of your clients paid late this quarter. It has never seen your invoices, so any names it gives are guesses. Ask an assistant that can read your invoice records and it can list the actual overdue invoices, which you can open and check one by one.

How OrgLines handles it

The OrgLines assistant works with the data of your workspace, within the modules your plan includes and the sections your role allows. It reads the records and answers with specifics, and you can add price lists, contract templates and procedures to a knowledge base so it answers from your documents. When it prepares a change, you see the exact records and fields involved, and most changes to shared business records are only proposed until a person confirms them. In Safe mode it only looks and explains. It is still not infallible, so keep checking.

Try it free in OrgLines