Garbage In, Hallucinations Out: How Clean Data Drives LLM Performance

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/garbage-in-hallucinations-out-how-clean-data-drives-llm-performance. Learn how clean, validated data reduces LLM hallucinations, improves RAG performance, and powers reliable enterprise AI systems. Check more stories related to machine-learning at: https://hackernoon.com/c/machine-learning. You can also check exclusive content about #ai-data-quality, #rag, #enterprise-ai, #semantic-search, #data-validation, #ai-governance, #data-enrichment, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @melissaindia. Learn more about this writer by checking @melissaindia's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. This article argues that the biggest driver of LLM reliability in enterprise environments is not model selection, but data quality. Focusing heavily on RAG architectures, it explains how duplicate records, stale information, inconsistent formatting, and incomplete datasets create hallucinations and retrieval failures, while outlining the characteristics of AI-ready data pipelines built around validation, enrichment, and standardization.