Prompting glossary
Hallucination
Confident wording, invented facts.
What it means
A hallucination is an AI answer that sounds authoritative but contains details that are not true: fake statistics, invented sources, features a product does not have. Asking the model to flag anything it is unsure of, and checking every number, is the practical defence.
Example
If any figure is not something I gave you, write UNVERIFIED next to it instead of guessing.
How to use this in practice
Knowing the word is the easy half. The useful half is writing the instruction so the AI does not have to guess: say who it should act as, give it the background it cannot know, state the outcome you want, set the limits, and name the format the answer should come back in. That is the same structure behind every template in the free prompt library.
Want prompts written for your business instead of definitions?