If you’ve spent any time chatting with an AI, you’ve probably had a moment where it told you something that felt completely true, only to find out later it was 100% made up. It might have invented a historical fact, cited a legal case that never happened, or given you a recipe for a dish that would be physically impossible to cook. This is called a hallucination. But despite the name, the AI isn’t seeing ghosts or losing its mind. To understand why this happens, you have to peek under the hood of how AI actually "thinks."
