What's the most confidently wrong answer AI has given you about your data?
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I'm not talking about the obviously ridiculous AI hallucinations. I'm talking about those answers that looked completely believable until someone actually checked the numbers.
Maybe it was a calculation, a misleading chart, or a metric that meant something entirely different from what the AI assumed. What happened, and how did you catch it?
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Good question to ask.. Everyone talks about hallucinations, but the believable wrong answers are the ones that cost real time.
Mine was a translation that passed every glance I gave it.
I build a flashcard generator tool. A Spanish to English deck came back with "la penumbra → 半明 light, semi-darkness". The English part is right, and the card looked fine in a list of thirty. But two Chinese characters had slipped into a deck where neither language uses them.
I didn't catch it by reading. I caught it by checking every card's script against the two languages in the pair. It turned up in 2 of 57 decks, which is exactly the rate where nobody notices by eye.
The part I'd push back on is the instinct to clean it up. Stripping the stray characters leaves "light, semi-darkness", which is a different answer than the model gave. So we drop the card instead and tell the user they got fewer than they asked for.