AI isn’t hallucinating—but your data might be

“Hallucination” has become the catch-all term for AI getting things wrong. It describes a real phenomenon: Large language models can generate confident, fluent answers that are simply untrue. But in IT operations, many errors labeled as hallucinations have a more ordinary explanation. The AI isn’t inventing facts. It’s faithfully reporting information that happens to be outdated, incomplete, or contradictory. I’ve seen this play out across enough environments to know the cause usually sits upstream, in the data the system learned from and the picture of the estate it read. Fix the data foundat