How to spot a hallucination before it spots you

Hallucinations are not random. They follow patterns. Once you know the patterns, you can read an AI answer the same way an editor reads a press release — fast, alert, and quietly suspicious of the most fluent sentences.

Why fluency is the trap

The instinct most people apply to AI answers is the wrong one: if it sounds confident, it must be right. In practice, the opposite is more useful — if it sounds suspiciously polished on a topic where you would normally see hedging, slow down.

[Migration in progress — full article body to be brought across from the original Notion source.]

Five tells

1. Specific numbers without a source. Real expertise hedges.
2. Quotes attributed to named people. Verify, always.
3. Citations that read like real citations but don’t resolve. A common failure mode.
4. Smooth transitions between unrelated facts. Models love coherence, even fake coherence.
5. A confident answer to a question with no public answer. That’s not knowledge — that’s confabulation.