AI “Hallucinations” and How to Avoid Them

Everybody’s heard that AIs “hallucinate.” That is, they come up with stuff that sounds plausible but just isn’t so. But how many people have actually seen an AI hallucinate? How many were absolutely sure that its output was wrong in multiple ways? And how many made a note of the hallucination and described it in detail in writing?

Probably AI researchers and developers have done all this. But they have an incentive to keep their work secret (1) to avoid public embarrassment and (2) to get a jump on their employers’s competitors in avoiding hallucinations.

So I thought I would report, in some detail, how an AI served up one hallucination. My example is just one snowflake in a whiteout, but with so little detailed information about hallucinations made public, maybe it’ll help.

Part of this hallucination involves name confusion. My father was a novelist, Hollywood screenwriter and writer for TV. He used and wrote under several names, but his most common published name was Jay Dratler. My name is Jay Dratler, Jr.

In his long writing career, my father penned some memorable turns of phrase, such as “I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.” On reading that, my wife wanted to learn more, so she asked Google, on or about January 3, 2026, to produce “dr j dratler quotes.” Google sent the query to its AI to produce an “AI Overview,” which you can read in full by submitting the same prompt. (Google may improve its response as time goes on, so note the date.)

The hallucinating part, verbatim, was this paragraph and its caption:

“On Business & Law (from his academic writing):

“The Bill of Rights is to the protection of our fundamental personal freedoms. And the freedom guaranteed each and every business, no matter how small, is the freedom to compete—to assert with vigor, imagination, devotion, and ingenuity whatever economic muscle it can.”

Let me count the errors in this reply:

1. The first “sentence” is incomplete. Even worse, it implies that the subject of the paragraph is the Bill of Rights.  In reality (see the missing part below), it’s our antitrust law.

2. My Dad never wrote anything “academic” because he never taught. When, late in life, he had a creative dry spell, we urged him to teach, and he replied “I’m a writer, not a teacher.”

3. It was I, Jr., who became an academic and a law professor after careers as a scientist/engineer and a business lawyer.

4. The passage quoted (except for two missing parts and consequent grammatical issues) was not original with either me or my father. It was penned by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in one of his rare antitrust opinions. Marshall’s original passage read in full as follows:

“Antitrust laws in general, and the Sherman Act in particular, are the Magna Carta of free enterprise. They are as important to the preservation of economic freedom and our free-enterprise system as the Bill of Rights is to the protection of our fundamental personal freedoms. And the freedom guaranteed each and every business, no matter how small, is the freedom to compete—to assert with vigor, imagination, devotion, and ingenuity whatever economic muscle it can muster.”

U.S. v. Topco Associates, Inc., 405 U.S. 596, 610 (1971) (Marshall, J.).

5. The final word “muster” in Justice Marshall’s ringing passage is missing from the AI excerpt, marking yet another error in transcription and grammar.

6. My father cannot possibly have even copied this quotation from Justice Marshall’s work, because my father died in 1968, three years before Marshall’s words were published.

7. It was I who quoted Marshall’s work, with attribution, in one or more law-review articles I wrote and published as a law professor. (The AI did get this bit right in the right sidebar, quoting an article I wrote as the Goodyear Professor of Intellectual Property at the University of Akron, Ohio, School of Law. The sidebar actually included my name as author but erred by including it in a summary of my father’s juicy quotes.)

So the AI got things wrong in seven ways. In its defense, I can say that my wife’s prompt, “dr j dratler quotes,” understandably confused the issue. It’s I who have a doctor’s degree (in physics, UCSD 1972); my Dad never finished college but dropped out to write.

So what can one conclude from this short and rather troubling tale? There are at least six lessons:

1. Your AI prompt is absolutely crucial. An AI may grossly magnify small factual errors or inconsistencies. Write your prompts competely, carefully and simply, as if you were writing for a bright sixth grader.

2. Make sure you have the facts that you use in your prompt right, or at least that they’re internally consistent. If you are aware of nuances that might affect the analysis (such as, in our case, two different people with nearly identical names, or the vast difference between writing fiction for entertainment and writing legal analysis), spell them out in your prompt. 

3. Don’t depend on AIs to have mastered the nuances of grammar or writing. (This warning underlines teachers’ common advice: use AIs for factual and background research only, but do your own writing, especially in courses in English or writing.)

4. Don’t depend on AIs to have mastered the nuances of human society and culture, including such things as: (a) fathers naming their sons after them and appending a “Jr.”; (b) one writer quoting another, with or without attribution; or (c) qualitative differences in work and careers, such as the difference between Hollywood screenwriting and academic legal writing.

5. Don’t expect an AI to begin independently writing like a distinguished Supreme Court Justice, let alone like William Shakespeare, anytime soon. If you want your writing to shine, learn to do it yourself, and use AIs only for background and inspiration.

6. Plagiarism may be getting harder and harder to detect, and AIs may increase the temptation to do it. But it still won’t make you smart, or a better writer. Only practice can do that.

PLEASE SEND A LINK TO THIS POST TO TEACHERS AND PROFESSORS WHOM YOU KNOW. AI IS RAPIDLY BECOMING THE BANE OF THEIR EXISTENCE AND A DISTRACTION FROM THEIR REAL WORK. MAYBE THIS POST WILL HELP.