Hallucination Drift
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Hallucination drift is when an AI starts with one small made-up fact, then builds on it, and by the end the entire conversation is based on fiction. Each step seems reasonable. The foundation was never real.
Real Talk
Hallucination drift is the compounding effect where an initial AI hallucination becomes premise for subsequent reasoning, propagating and amplifying the error. Particularly dangerous in agentic loops where the model acts on its own outputs. Mitigations: grounding against verified sources, tool-use for fact-checking, and periodic context validation.
When You'll Hear This
"The agent hallucinated a function name and built three more calls around it. Classic hallucination drift." / "Add a verification step to catch hallucination drift."
Related Terms
Confabulation
Confabulation is when an AI invents a plausible-sounding answer and delivers it with total confidence, when the honest answer would be 'I don't know.
Context Poisoning
Context poisoning is when bad information makes it into the AI's context and contaminates everything after.
Hallucination
When an AI confidently makes something up — like citing a library that doesn't exist or generating code that calls a function that was never written.