Foundations · Chapter 5 of 11
Hallucinations — what they are and why
AI makes things up — confidently. Learn to spot hallucinations, verify outputs, and build habits that keep you in control.
Since AI reconstructs rather than retrieves, it can generate confident, fluent responses that are completely wrong.
How to protect yourself
✓Verify important facts independently
✓Challenge responses that feel too neat
✓Give it trusted documents as source material
✓Enable web search when you need current data
✓Check any sources, links or quotes it cites are real
✓Iterate until it's right. Don't just run with the first output.
AI always gives an answer. Your judgement decides whether it's right.