What Whisper Down the Lane Taught Us About AI Hallucinations and Made-Up Citations

Nobody lied in Whisper Down the Lane. The distortion happened through a series of small, confident approximations — each player faithfully passing along their best reconstruction of what they heard. That is exactly how AI hallucinations work. And it is exactly why AI models cite sources that don't exist with complete confidence. This post explains the mechanism behind AI hallucinations, the real-world consequences of fabricated citations, and what brands can do to make their content hallucination-resistant in an AI-mediated search landscape.