Episode 7: Failure Modes

Why do AI models hallucinate, drift, or produce generic answers? In this episode, we analyze the 9 distinct failure modes—including fabrications, invented citations, confident approximations, stale knowledge, instruction decay, sycophantic drift, and averaging. We explain why text prediction creates plausible errors and share practical verification habits, such as demanding exact source quotes, testing across fresh chats, and running pushback tests without new evidence.