Hallucination
also known as: AI hallucination
An AI system generating an answer, citation or fact that is fabricated rather than grounded in anything real, the single biggest reason technical buyers distrust AI-generated content. A monitoring tool built on top of AI answers inherits this risk twice over: once from the surface being captured, and again if the capture pipeline itself ever fills a gap with something plausible instead of admitting it saw nothing.
In AI Search API
The second risk is the one this contract is built to eliminate structurally. A surface that returns nothing completes as surfacePresent:false with a surface_absent warning, never coerced into an empty string that looks like "no data" rather than "we didn’t check", and never backfilled with a guess. A driver that cannot run fails loud with DRIVER_UNAVAILABLE instead of returning a mock. What the surface itself said is a separate question the Envelope does not adjudicate. It reports the real answer.text verbatim, hallucinated or not, so you can judge it yourself.
// machine-readable reason, no fabricated answer:
{ "error": { "code": "DRIVER_UNAVAILABLE", "surface": "chatgpt" } }Related terms
See it in the product
Every definition here is enforced in the Envelope contract. Run a capture and read the fields yourself.