How do I stop AI from making up facts and sources?

You stop AI from making up facts by treating it like a smart intern who needs clear boundaries — always ask it to cite verifiable sources, never trust a claim without checking it, and use tools with built-in fact-grounding when accuracy is critical. This problem has a name: hallucination. It's when an AI confidently invents a statistic, a study, or even a person because it's designed to predict the next plausible word, not to know what's true. The fix isn't one step. It's a habit. First, in your prompt, add a line like: 'Only include claims you can link to a publicly available source, and provide the URL.' This doesn't guarantee accuracy — the AI can still hallucinate a fake link — but it reduces the odds. Second, for anything you plan to publish, verify the top 3 factual claims yourself. A 2023 study by Vectara found that even the best models hallucinate 3-5% of the time. That's low, but not zero. If you're writing about medical, legal, or financial topics, the risk is too high to skip this step. Third, some tools now connect to live search data. Perplexity and Google's Gemini can pull from the web in real time, which grounds their answers in actual pages. AI-Mind, a zero-prompt AI content generator, takes a different approach by focusing on content creation rather than research, so you're less likely to run into invented citations in the first place. The bottom line: if a fact feels surprising or too perfect, it probably is. Look it up. **Related**: How can I tell if AI text is accurate? | What is AI hallucination and why does it happen?