When AI Lies to You: Hallucination, Data Quality, and the Old School Fix

Photo by Galina Nelyubova on Unsplash AI doesn’t know it’s wrong. That’s the problem. Here’s how traditional discipline keeps the machine honest. AI systems now influence drug prescriptions, financial decisions, and insurance outcomes. Most of the people on the receiving end have no idea that the model generating those outputs can - and sometimes does - fabricate them entirely, with perfect confidence and zero warning. That phenomenon has a name: hallucination. And in the world of data quality, it is not a quirk. It is a defect. A serious one.