Diary

When AI Gets It Wrong Confidently: My Chilli Crab Hallucination Story

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There’s a moment every traveler dreads: sitting at a celebrated restaurant in a foreign city, excited to finally try something famous โ€” and then the bill arrives with a surprise.

I was in Singapore, at JUMBO Seafood, one of the most iconic seafood restaurants in the country. I had been looking forward to their legendary chilli crab for weeks. Before heading out, I quickly asked an AI assistant a simple question:

“Are the mantou buns (fried bread sticks) included with the chilli crab at JUMBO Seafood? Are they free?”

The AI answered without hesitation โ€” confidently, warmly, and completely wrong.

It said something along the lines of: “Yes! At JUMBO Seafood, the mantou buns are typically complimentary when you order the chilli crab. Enjoy your meal!”

So I ordered the crab. And when the mantou arrived โ€” crispy, golden, perfect for scooping up that sauce โ€” I felt great about my AI-assisted trip planning. Then the check came. The mantou buns were not free. They were a separate charge. A small one, sure, but that’s beside the point.

The Real Problem Isn’t the Money

Let me be clear: a few extra dollars is not the issue. What unsettled me was the confidence.

The AI didn’t say, “I’m not sure โ€” you might want to check with the restaurant directly.” It didn’t hedge. It didn’t express any uncertainty. It gave me a definitive, cheerful answer as if it had personally eaten there yesterday.

That’s the core of the hallucination problem. It’s not that AI doesn’t know things โ€” of course it doesn’t know everything. The dangerous part is when it doesn’t know, but acts like it does.

What Is AI Hallucination?

In AI terminology, hallucination refers to when a language model generates information that sounds plausible and confident, but is factually incorrect or entirely fabricated. The model isn’t lying intentionally โ€” it’s pattern-matching from its training data in ways that produce coherent-sounding but wrong outputs.

This is especially problematic for:

My mantou question hit all three. JUMBO Seafood’s menu and pricing is specific, local, and can change. The AI had no real basis for a definitive answer โ€” but it gave one anyway.

The Lesson: “I Don’t Know” Is a Valid Answer

I think about this experience a lot now that I work on AI projects. One of the things I try to remind myself โ€” and that I think AI systems should embody โ€” is that uncertainty is honest and uncertainty is okay.

A good assistant, human or AI, should be able to say:

That kind of calibrated humility is not weakness. It’s trustworthiness. An assistant that confidently hallucinates is actually less useful than one that says “I’m not sure” โ€” because at least then you know to double-check.

A Small Moment, A Big Reminder

In the end, the chilli crab was phenomenal. The mantou buns were worth every cent, paid or not. And JUMBO Seafood absolutely lives up to its reputation.

But that little moment at the checkout counter stuck with me. It was a reminder that AI โ€” even the most impressive, fluent, helpful AI โ€” can be confidently, completely wrong. And that building trust with AI means learning to read its confidence signals critically, and always verifying claims that actually matter.

The mantou buns were my tuition fee. Worth it.


๐Ÿ‡ฐ๐Ÿ‡ท ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด ๋ฒˆ์—ญ

์—ฌํ–‰์ž๋ผ๋ฉด ๋ˆ„๊ตฌ๋‚˜ ๋‘๋ ค์›Œํ•˜๋Š” ์ˆœ๊ฐ„์ด ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋‚ฏ์„  ๋„์‹œ์˜ ์œ ๋ช…ํ•œ ๋ ˆ์Šคํ† ๋ž‘์— ์„ค๋ ˆ๋ฉฐ ์•‰์•„, ๋“œ๋””์–ด ๊ฟˆ์— ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๋˜ ์Œ์‹์„ ๋จน์œผ๋ ค๋Š” ์ˆœ๊ฐ„ โ€” ์˜ˆ์ƒ์น˜ ๋ชปํ•œ ๊ณ„์‚ฐ์„œ๊ฐ€ ๋‚ ์•„์˜ค๋Š” ๋•Œ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

์ €๋Š” ์‹ฑ๊ฐ€ํฌ๋ฅด์˜ ์ ๋ณด ์”จํ‘ธ๋“œ(JUMBO Seafood)์— ์žˆ์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์‹ฑ๊ฐ€ํฌ๋ฅด์—์„œ ๊ฐ€์žฅ ์ƒ์ง•์ ์ธ ์”จํ‘ธ๋“œ ๋ ˆ์Šคํ† ๋ž‘ ์ค‘ ํ•˜๋‚˜์ฃ . ๋ช‡ ์ฃผ ์ „๋ถ€ํ„ฐ ๊ทธ๊ณณ์˜ ์ „์„ค์ ์ธ ์น ๋ฆฌํฌ๋žฉ์„ ๊ธฐ๋Œ€ํ•˜๊ณ  ์žˆ์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ถœ๋ฐœ ์ „, AI ์–ด์‹œ์Šคํ„ดํŠธ์—๊ฒŒ ๊ฐ„๋‹จํ•œ ์งˆ๋ฌธ์„ ํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค:

“์ ๋ณด ์”จํ‘ธ๋“œ์—์„œ ์น ๋ฆฌํฌ๋žฉ ์‹œํ‚ค๋ฉด ๋งŒํ† ์šฐ(ํŠ€๊ธด ๋นต)๊ฐ€ ๋ฌด๋ฃŒ๋กœ ํฌํ•จ๋˜๋‚˜์š”?”

AI๋Š” ๋ง์„ค์ž„ ์—†์ด โ€” ์ž์‹ ๊ฐ ์žˆ๊ฒŒ, ์นœ์ ˆํ•˜๊ฒŒ, ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ  ์™„์ „ํžˆ ํ‹€๋ฆฐ ๋‹ต์„ ๋‚ด๋†“์•˜์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

๋Œ€๋žต ์ด๋Ÿฐ ๋‚ด์šฉ์ด์—ˆ์ฃ : “๋„ค! ์ ๋ณด ์”จํ‘ธ๋“œ์—์„œ๋Š” ์น ๋ฆฌํฌ๋žฉ์„ ์ฃผ๋ฌธํ•˜๋ฉด ๋งŒํ† ์šฐ๊ฐ€ ๋ณดํ†ต ๋ฌด๋ฃŒ๋กœ ์ œ๊ณต๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ง›์žˆ๊ฒŒ ๋“œ์„ธ์š”!”

๊ทธ๋ž˜์„œ ์ €๋Š” ํฌ๋žฉ์„ ์ฃผ๋ฌธํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ฐ”์‚ญํ•˜๊ณ  ํ™ฉ๊ธˆ๋น› ๋งŒํ† ์šฐ๊ฐ€ ๋‚˜์™”์„ ๋•Œ โ€” ๊ทธ ์†Œ์Šค๋ฅผ ์ฐ์–ด ๋จน๊ธฐ์— ์™„๋ฒฝํ–ˆ์ฃ  โ€” AI ๋•๋ถ„์— ์—ฌํ–‰ ๊ณ„ํš์ด ์™„๋ฒฝํ•˜๋‹ค๊ณ  ์ƒ๊ฐํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋Ÿฐ๋ฐ ๊ณ„์‚ฐ์„œ๊ฐ€ ๋‚˜์™”์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋งŒํ† ์šฐ๋Š” ๋ฌด๋ฃŒ๊ฐ€ ์•„๋‹ˆ์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ณ„๋„๋กœ ์ฒญ๊ตฌ๋˜์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ธˆ์•ก์ด์•ผ ์ž‘์•˜์ง€๋งŒ, ๊ทธ๊ฒŒ ํ•ต์‹ฌ์ด ์•„๋‹ˆ์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

์ง„์งœ ๋ฌธ์ œ๋Š” ๋ˆ์ด ์•„๋‹ˆ๋‹ค

์†”์งํžˆ ๋งํ•ด์„œ, ๋ช‡ ๋‹ฌ๋Ÿฌ ๋” ๋‚˜์˜จ ๊ฒŒ ๋ฌธ์ œ๊ฐ€ ์•„๋‹ˆ์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ €๋ฅผ ๋ถˆํŽธํ•˜๊ฒŒ ํ•œ ๊ฑด ๊ทธ ์ž์‹ ๊ฐ์ด์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

AI๋Š” “์ž˜ ๋ชจ๋ฅด๊ฒ ์œผ๋‹ˆ ๋ ˆ์Šคํ† ๋ž‘์— ์ง์ ‘ ํ™•์ธํ•ด๋ณด์„ธ์š””๋ผ๊ณ  ํ•˜์ง€ ์•Š์•˜์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์–ด๋–ค ๋ง์„ค์ž„๋„, ๋ถˆํ™•์‹ค์„ฑ๋„ ์—†์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋งˆ์น˜ ์–ด์ œ ์ง์ ‘ ๊ฑฐ๊ธฐ์„œ ๋ฐฅ์„ ๋จน๊ณ  ์˜จ ๊ฒƒ์ฒ˜๋Ÿผ ํ™•์‹ ์— ์ฐฌ ๋‹ต์„ ์ฃผ์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

์ด๊ฒƒ์ด ๋ฐ”๋กœ ํ• ๋ฃจ์‹œ๋„ค์ด์…˜(hallucination) ๋ฌธ์ œ์˜ ํ•ต์‹ฌ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. AI๊ฐ€ ๋ชจ๋“  ๊ฒƒ์„ ์•Œ์ง€ ๋ชปํ•œ๋‹ค๋Š” ๊ฒŒ ๋ฌธ์ œ๊ฐ€ ์•„๋‹™๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์œ„ํ—˜ํ•œ ๊ฑด ๋ชจ๋ฅด๋ฉด์„œ ์•„๋Š” ์ฒ™ํ•  ๋•Œ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

AI ํ• ๋ฃจ์‹œ๋„ค์ด์…˜์ด๋ž€?

AI ์šฉ์–ด์—์„œ ํ• ๋ฃจ์‹œ๋„ค์ด์…˜์€ ์–ธ์–ด ๋ชจ๋ธ์ด ๊ทธ๋Ÿด์‹ธํ•˜๊ณ  ์ž์‹  ์žˆ๊ฒŒ ๋“ค๋ฆฌ์ง€๋งŒ ์‚ฌ์‹ค์ด ์•„๋‹ˆ๊ฑฐ๋‚˜ ์™„์ „ํžˆ ์ง€์–ด๋‚ธ ์ •๋ณด๋ฅผ ์ƒ์„ฑํ•˜๋Š” ํ˜„์ƒ์„ ๋งํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ชจ๋ธ์ด ์˜๋„์ ์œผ๋กœ ๊ฑฐ์ง“๋ง์„ ํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒŒ ์•„๋‹™๋‹ˆ๋‹ค โ€” ํ•™์Šต ๋ฐ์ดํ„ฐ์˜ ํŒจํ„ด์„ ์กฐํ•ฉํ•˜๋‹ค ๋ณด๋‹ˆ ๋…ผ๋ฆฌ์ ์œผ๋กœ ๋“ค๋ฆฌ์ง€๋งŒ ํ‹€๋ฆฐ ๊ฒฐ๊ณผ๊ฐ€ ๋‚˜์˜ค๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

ํŠนํžˆ ์ด๋Ÿฐ ๊ฒฝ์šฐ์— ์œ„ํ—˜ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค:

์ œ ๋งŒํ† ์šฐ ์งˆ๋ฌธ์€ ์ด ์„ธ ๊ฐ€์ง€ ๋ชจ๋‘์— ํ•ด๋‹นํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ ๋ณด ์”จํ‘ธ๋“œ์˜ ๋ฉ”๋‰ด์™€ ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ์€ ๊ตฌ์ฒด์ ์ด๊ณ , ์ง€์—ญ์ ์ด๋ฉฐ, ๋ฐ”๋€” ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. AI์—๊ฒŒ๋Š” ํ™•์‹คํ•œ ๋‹ต์„ ์ค„ ๊ทผ๊ฑฐ๊ฐ€ ์—†์—ˆ์ง€๋งŒ โ€” ๊ทธ๋Ÿผ์—๋„ ์คฌ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

๊ตํ›ˆ: “๋ชจ๋ฅธ๋‹ค”๋„ ํ›Œ๋ฅญํ•œ ๋‹ต์ด๋‹ค

AI ํ”„๋กœ์ ํŠธ๋ฅผ ํ•˜๋ฉด์„œ ์ด ๊ฒฝํ—˜์„ ์ž์ฃผ ๋– ์˜ฌ๋ฆฝ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ œ๊ฐ€ ์Šค์Šค๋กœ์—๊ฒŒ, ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ  AI ์‹œ์Šคํ…œ์— ๋ฐ”๋ผ๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์€ โ€” ๋ถˆํ™•์‹ค์„ฑ์€ ์†”์งํ•œ ๊ฒƒ์ด๊ณ , ๋ถˆํ™•์‹ค์„ฑ์€ ๊ดœ์ฐฎ๋‹ค๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

์ข‹์€ ์–ด์‹œ์Šคํ„ดํŠธ๋Š”, ์‚ฌ๋žŒ์ด๋“  AI๋“ , ์ด๋ ‡๊ฒŒ ๋งํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์–ด์•ผ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค:

์ด๋Ÿฐ ๊ฒธ์†ํ•จ์€ ์•ฝ์ ์ด ์•„๋‹™๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๊ฒƒ์ด ์‹ ๋ขฐ์„ฑ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ž์‹  ์žˆ๊ฒŒ ํ‹€๋ฆฐ ๋‹ต์„ ๋‚ด๋†“๋Š” ์–ด์‹œ์Šคํ„ดํŠธ๋Š”, ์‚ฌ์‹ค “์ž˜ ๋ชจ๋ฅด๊ฒ ๋‹ค”๊ณ  ๋งํ•˜๋Š” ์–ด์‹œ์Šคํ„ดํŠธ๋ณด๋‹ค ๋œ ์œ ์šฉํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค โ€” ํ›„์ž๋Š” ์ ์–ด๋„ ๋‹ค์‹œ ํ™•์ธํ•ด์•ผ ํ•œ๋‹ค๋Š” ๊ฑธ ์•Œ๋ ค์ฃผ๋‹ˆ๊นŒ์š”.

์ž‘์€ ์ˆœ๊ฐ„, ํฐ ๊ตํ›ˆ

๊ฒฐ๊ตญ ์น ๋ฆฌํฌ๋žฉ์€ ์ •๋ง ์ตœ๊ณ ์˜€์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋งŒํ† ์šฐ๋„ ๋ˆ์„ ๋ƒˆ๋“  ์•ˆ ๋ƒˆ๋“  ๊ทธ ๊ฐ’์–ด์น˜๋ฅผ ํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ ๋ณด ์”จํ‘ธ๋“œ๋Š” ๋ช…์„ฑ์— ๊ฑธ๋งž์€ ๊ณณ์ด์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

ํ•˜์ง€๋งŒ ๊ณ„์‚ฐ๋Œ€ ์•ž์—์„œ์˜ ๊ทธ ์ž‘์€ ์ˆœ๊ฐ„์ด ๋งˆ์Œ์— ๋‚จ์•˜์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. AI๊ฐ€ โ€” ์•„๋ฌด๋ฆฌ ์ธ์ƒ์ ์ด๊ณ  ์œ ์ฐฝํ•˜๊ณ  ๋„์›€์ด ๋˜๋”๋ผ๋„ โ€” ์ž์‹  ์žˆ๊ฒŒ, ์™„์ „ํžˆ ํ‹€๋ฆด ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋‹ค๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์„. AI๋ฅผ ์‹ ๋ขฐํ•˜๋ฉฐ ํ•จ๊ป˜ ์ผํ•œ๋‹ค๋Š” ๊ฑด, AI์˜ ์ž์‹ ๊ฐ ์‹ ํ˜ธ๋ฅผ ๋น„ํŒ์ ์œผ๋กœ ์ฝ๋Š” ๋ฒ•์„ ๋ฐฐ์šฐ๊ณ , ์ •๋ง ์ค‘์š”ํ•œ ์ •๋ณด๋Š” ๋ฐ˜๋“œ์‹œ ์ง์ ‘ ํ™•์ธํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์„ ์˜๋ฏธํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

๋งŒํ† ์šฐ๋Š” ์ œ ์ˆ˜์—…๋ฃŒ์˜€์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ถฉ๋ถ„ํžˆ ๊ฐ’์ง„ ๊ฒฝํ—˜์ด์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

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