How to Combat AI Hallucinations and Improve Accuracy

One of the most popular criticisms of generative AI tools is that they often “hallucinate,” or make up information, making them a bit unreliable for certain high-stakes tasks. To help you combat hallucinations, we recommend you try out the following tips in your own use of generative AI. You might find that you get better, more reliable outputs as a result.

Provide Context Where It Helps

This is a bit of a generalized catch-all prompt tip, but it also helps your AI model provide better output.

Context is what helps the AI prompt put together a response that’s relevant to your needs. When you get as clear as possible, you can significantly cut down on the number of hallucinations you experience. For example, tell the AI what this output is going to be used for; tell it the target audience and the goal of the document.

You might be surprised by how much a little bit of clarity helps the AI cut through the fat, so to speak.

Take Advantage of Tone

By default, your AI model can provide responses in a variety of different tones, all of which have a place within different types of environments.

You can leverage the idea of tone to get the kind of output you need from your AI model. Ask it for a fact-based response in a formal, business-like tone and see what kind of output you get. More often than not, the more specific you can get with your input, the higher the quality of your output—this applies to accuracy as well.

Remember, there should be no room for vague inputs with your AI use, as that creates more room for problems to surface.

Provide Your Own Examples of Reliable Information Sources

If you have excellent go-to sources for your business’ needs, consider sharing these with your AI model as a way to encourage it to use the right kinds of sources in its research.

More critically, you can have your AI model exclusively use specific sources of information. The advantage of this is that you can control the flow of information to your AI; you can have it include or omit information from the websites you deem worthy. You can do this with uploaded documents and files, too, offering AI examples of what you’re looking for so it doesn’t feel the need to make things up along the way.

Naturally, you should be careful with what you share with your AI model—especially if it’s a public model.

Want to get more out of your AI tools? Be sure to keep an eye on our blog for more cutting-edge tips and tricks on how to effectively use AI.