Guides/Hallucination & grounding
Hallucination & grounding playbook
Confident wrong answers erode trust faster than slow answers. Product teams ship resilience by pairing retrieval + citation UX when facts matter, calibrated hedging when evidence is thin, and explicit abstention when stakes exceed model proof.
Response posture flow
Use with legal/clinical partners — this diagram encodes product judgment, not a regulatory framework by itself.
Patterns in practice
| Pattern | UX surface | Typical backend hooks |
|---|---|---|
| Citation-backed answer | Inline sources, “jump to doc” links | RAG with chunk attribution; freshness SLAs |
| Calibrated hedge | “Based on limited info…” + what would verify | Confidence routing; optional second-pass retrieval |
| Hard abstain | Refuse + suggest human / ticket | Classifier or policy gate before generate |
| Creative draft | Mode badge; no fabricated citations | Separate prompt path; disable retrieval hooks |
Trust vs friction tradeoff
Strict grounding slows happy-path fluent demos — negotiate personas (support vs creative) instead of one-size defaults.
Trust vs product friction (schematic)
Higher friction includes loading sources, longer responses, extra taps — tune per persona.