Versatile AI Risk Assessment

Glossary Threats and weaknesses

Hallucination (confabulation)

Plausible sounding but factually wrong output, inherent to the technology.

As of: September 2026 · Glossary with 28 terms

What is Hallucination (confabulation)?

Language models produce text that sounds plausible but can be factually wrong: invented facts, sources, legal sections or programming interfaces. These confabulations are inherent to the technology, because models continue probabilities rather than querying a knowledge base.

For risk management the individual wrong answer matters less than the process around it: expert review before use, labelling of AI-generated content, evidence requirements for critical statements, and measuring the error rate in your own use case.

OWASP LLM09:2025NIST AI RMFReliability

Threats using this term (1)

Entries in the threat catalogue whose text uses the term. Every link leads to the full threat page.

Factual Inconsistencies (Hallucinations) AI language models sometimes produce content that sounds convincing but is simply made up (hallucinations), including citations, figures, …

More terms from the subject area Threats and weaknesses.

Prompt Injection Manipulated input or planted content redirects a language model. Data Poisoning Manipulated training or reference data steers a model wrong on purpose. Model theft and model extraction Theft of model weights or reconstruction of the model through the interface.

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See hallucination threats in the catalogue All terms in the glossary

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“Hallucination (confabulation)”. Versatile AI Risk Assessment, glossary of AI risk analysis, as of September 2026.
https://www.versatile-ai-risk-assessment.com/en/wissensbasis/glossary/halluzination/

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