Your AI Is Designed to Lie - Hallucinations Aren’t a Bug, They’re the Design

I read it so you don't need to

You’ve probably noticed that AI confidently makes things up. Citations that don’t exist, historical events that never happened, plausible sounding nonsense delivered with total certainty. The usual explanation is that it needs more training data, better fine tuning, or bigger models. A new paper from researchers at RA Software and Sofia University argues something more unsettling: hallucination isn’t a bug. It’s what the architecture is designed to do.

What this means for you

• Stop trusting AI in contexts where accuracy matters and you can’t verify the output. Citations, historical claims, causal reasoning, anything requiring temporal coherence: all vulnerable. The fluency is a trap. The more natural it sounds, the less you should trust it without verification.

• If you’re building products with AI: design for failure. Assume hallucination will occur and build verification into your workflow. Don’t offshore trust to the model.

• If you’re excited about AI progress: temper expectations. We’re not on a smooth curve toward AGI. We’re hitting an architectural limit that scaling won’t solve. The next breakthrough, if it comes, requires rethinking transformers entirely.

Explain it simply

Imagine someone who’s memorised every book ever written but has never left a library. They can sound brilliant discussing anything because they’ve absorbed all these patterns of how humans talk. But they’ve never experienced weather, never felt time pass, never used an object, never had a conversation shaped by mood or context.