The Good Tech Companies - Taming AI Hallucinations: Mitigating Hallucinations in AI Apps with Human-in-the-Loop Testing

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/taming-ai-hallucinations-mitigating-hallucinations-in-ai-apps-with-human-in-the-loop-testing. AI hallucinations occur when an artificial intelligence system generates incorrect or misleading outputs based on patterns that don’t actually exist. Check more stories related to machine-learning at: https://hackernoon.com/c/machine-learning. You can also check exclusive content about #artificial-intelligence, #ai-hallucinations, #prevent-ai-hallucinations, #generative-ai-issues, #how-to-stop-ai-hallucinations, #what-causes-ai-hallucinations, #why-ai-hallucinations-persist, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @indium. Learn more about this writer by checking @indium's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. AI hallucinations occur when an artificial intelligence system generates incorrect or misleading outputs based on patterns that don’t actually exist.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Taming AI Hallucinations. Mitigating hallucinations in AI apps with human-in-the-loop testing, by Indium. Taming AI Hallucinations, an introduction. The AI said it with confidence. It was wrong with even more confidence. That, right there, is the problem. As generative AI solutions storm into every industry, healthcare, finance, law, retail, education, it's easy to get caught up in the allure of automation. And as businesses rush to integrate large language models into customer support,

healthcare, legal, and financial applications, a silent saboteur lurks behind every prompt. The AI hallucination problem. AI hallucinations occur when a model generates information that sounds plausible but is factually incorrect, fabricated, or misleading. While LLMs like GPT, Claude, and Lama have impressive generative abilities, they do not know the truth. They generate patterns based on statistical probabilities, not verified facts. This makes them powerful and dangerous, without proper oversight.

So, how do we tame the hallucination beast? With human in the loop, HITL, testing. What are AI hallucinations? AI hallucinations occur when an artificial intelligence system generates incorrect or misleading outputs based on patterns that don't actually exist. Essentially, the model, imagines, data or relationships it hasn't been trained in, resulting in fabricated or erroneous responses. These hallucinations can surface in text, images, audio, or decision-making processes. Hallucinations in AI can be broadly categorized

into two types. Intrinsic hallucinations, when the AI contradicts or misinterprets its input, e.g. misquoting a source or mixing up facts. Extrinsic hallucinations, when the AI invents information without a basis in any input or training data. Hallucinations typically fall into three buckets. 1. Factual hallucinations, the model invents a name, date, fact, or relationship that doesn't exist. Example. Marie Curie discovered insulin in 1921, she didn't. It

was Frederick Banting and Charles Best. 2. Contextual hallucinations. The response doesn't align with the prompt or the user's intent. Example, you ask for the side effects of a drug, and the AI gives you benefits instead. 3. Logical hallucinations. The model makes flawed inferences, contradicts itself, or violates reasoning. Example, all cats are animals. All animals have wings. Therefore, all cats have wings.

While these may seem amusing to a casual chatbot, they're dangerous in a legal, medical, or financial context. A study by OpenAI found that nearly 40% of AI-generated responses in healthcare-related tasks contained factual errors or hallucinations. In real-world applications, like AI chatbots recommending medical treatments or summarizing legal documents, hallucinations can be not just inconvenient but dangerous. What causes AI hallucinations? Several factors contribute to hallucinations in AI models, including Overfitting

When a model becomes too closely tailored to its training data, it may fail to generalize to new inputs, leading to errors and hallucinations when faced with novel situations. Poor quality training data The model may learn incorrect patterns and generate unreliable outputs if the training data is noisy, incomplete, or lacks diversity. Additionally, if the data distribution

changes over time, the model may hallucinate based on outdated patterns. Biased data. AI systems can amplify biases in training data, resulting in skewed or unfair predictions. This not only reduces the model's accuracy but also undermines its trustworthiness. Why AI hallucinations persist in even the most advanced models?

To understand hallucinations, we need to know how LLMs work. These models are a probabilistic next-token predictors trained on massive datasets. They don't fact- check, they complete patterns. While fine-tuning, instruction tuning, and prompt engineering help reduce hallucinations, they don't eliminate them. Here's why. Lack of grounded knowledge. LLMs don't know facts.

They generate based on-core relations. Training data noise. Incomplete, conflicting, or biased data leads to poor generalization over generalization models may apply patterns broadly even where they don't fit lack of reasoning while models can mimic reasoning they don't truly understand logic or causality unverifiable sources LLMs often mix real and fake sources when generating citations. So, how do we build AI applications we can actually trust? By testing it with the right approach, why traditional testing falls short. You might wonder, can't we just test AI like we do software?

Not exactly. Traditional software testing relies on deterministic behavior. You expect the same output given the same input. LLMs, on the other hand, are non-deterministic. The same prompt may produce different outputs depending on context, model temperature, or fine-tuning. Even automated testing frameworks struggle to benchmark LLM responses for truthfulness, context alignment, tone, and user intent, especially when the answers look right.

That's where HITL testing steps in as a game changer. Human in the Loop, HIDL, Testing. The antidote to AI overconfidence. Human in the Loop testing is a structured approach that puts humans, domain experts, testers, users, at the center of LLM validation. It's about curating, judging, refining, and improving eye-generated responses using human reasoning, context awareness, and critical thinking. It doesn't mean throwing out automation. It means coupling algorithmic intelligence with human judgment, a harmony

between silicon and soul. Humans evaluate eye-generated outputs, especially for high-risk use cases, and pro-vVeed feedback on factual correctness. Contextual relevance, ethical or bias concerns, hallucination presence, tone and intent alignment, key components of HITL testing. 1. Prompt evaluation humans assess whether the model's response accurately reflects the input prompt. 2. Fact verification. Every output is checked against trusted sources or subject matter expertise. 3. Error annotation. Mistakes are categorized. E, G. Factual error, logic flaw, tone mismatch, hallucination type. 4. Severity scoring. Errors are scored by impact, minor inconsistency versus major misinformation. Five, feedback looping. Responses are either used to retrain the model, RLHF,

refine prompts, or blacklist failure patterns. The workflow. HITL testing in action. Let's break it down into a typical loop. One, prompt and response generation. The AI generates responses to predefined prompts covering expected use cases. Two, human evaluation and tagging domain experts are trained testers. generates responses to predefined prompts covering expected use cases. 2. Human evaluation and tagging domain experts are trained testers.

Evaluate responses using predefined rubrics, such as accuracy, coherence, completeness, sensitivity, etc. 3. Annotation and feedback logging testers tag hallucinated responses, rate their severity, and suggest corrections. 4. Model tuning or prompt iteration based on the analysis. Either the model is fine-tuned with better data, or the prompts are restructured for clarity and constraints. 5.

Validation loop the improved model is retested. Then, rinse and repeat until hallucinations drop below acceptable thresholds. HITL in action. A sample testing framework. Let's walk through a. HITL in action. A sample testing framework. Let's walk through a basic HITL testing cycle. Input. Prompt. Summarize the key provisions of the U.S. Clean Air Act.

Model output. The Clean Air Act, passed in 1990, bans all emissions from diesel engines and W as the first law to address global warming. Human review. Human Review. Fact 1. The Clean Air Act was passed in 1963, amended in 1970, 1977, and 1990. Fact 2. It regulates diesel emissions but doesn't ban them.

Fact 3. It focuses on air pollutants, not specifically global warming. Action taken. Output marked as, hallucinated, with three critical errors. Corrected version submitted for retraining. Prompt refined to be more specific. Response used as a case in the prompt engineering guide.

Real world example. AI in healthcare. Consider a healthcare chatbot powered by an LLM. A patient asks, Can I take ibuprofen with my blood pressure meds? The AI responds, yes, ibuprofen is safe with blood pressure medication, except, it's not always safe. In some cases, ibuprofen can increase blood pressure or interact with ACE inhibitors. In this scenario, AHITL testing setup would flag the AI's response as hallucinated and dangerous. Record a factual

correction E, G, check with your doctor, ibuprofen can elevate blood pressure in some cases. Quote closing parenthesis dot, retrain the model or inject warning prompts into the workflow. Add a fallback to escalate sensitive queries to human agents. Benefits of HITL testing. Reduced hallucination rate LLMs can be tuned to produce more factual Andre Levant responses through iterative testing and human feedback. Trust and compliance critical sectors like healthcare, finance, and legal demand regulatory compliance and explainability, human oversight provides both. Bias and ethical safeguards HITL testing helps catch factual errors in

problematic content, biases, stereotypes, toxicity, that automated tests may overlook. Better user experience hallucination free responses improve user trust, satisfaction, and adoption. When to use HITL testing? During model development. Especially for domain specific LLMs or fine-tuned applications. For high-risk applications, medical, legal, finance, or anything involving human safety. In post-deployment monitoring, set up feedback loops to catch hallucinations in live environments. In a healthcare-specific study, 80% of misdiagnoses in AI diagnostic tools were corrected when human clinicians were involved in the decision-making process. This highlights the importance of human validation to mitigate hallucinations in critical applications. Scaling HITL, combining automation and human expertise, as beneficial as HITL testing is, scaling it efficiently requires an innovative blend of tools and people.

Here's how organizations are doing it. Red teaming and adversarial testing to stress test models. Synthetic prompt generation to cover edge cases. Crowd-sourced reviewers for low-risk evaluations. Automated classifiers to flag potential hallucinations, then escalate to human testers. Feedback UI dashboards where business stakeholders and SMEs can rate and annotate outputs. How to prevent AI hallucination? Best practices for HITL testing build a structured evaluation rubric for humans to assess LLM

outputs. Include a diverse domain experts to detect nuanced errors. Automate low-hanging testing while escalating risky responses to humans, create feedback loops to retrain and refine. Don't just test once, test continuously. When HITL testing becomes non-negotiable, not all use cases require the same level of scrutiny, but for mission-critical, compliance-bound, or ethically sensitive applications, HITL is the frontline defense. Use cases that demand HITL, healthcare, diagnoses, treatment recommendations, insurance claim summaries, legal, case law analysis,

contract drafting, regulatory filings, finance, investment advice, portfolio insights, risk assessments, customer service, resolving disputes, billing queries, and product guidance. News and media, factual reporting, citation generation, bias control. Future outlook. Can we eliminate AI hallucination? Probably not entirely, but we can manage and reduce them to acceptable levels, especially in sensitive use cases.

AI is a mighty copilot, but not an infallible one. Left unchecked, hallucinations can erode trust, misinform users, and put organizations at risk. With human-in-the-loop testing, we don't just test for correctness, we teach the model to be better. With LLMs becoming a core layer of enterprise AI stacks, HITL testing will evolve from an optional QA step to a

standard governance practice. Just like code gets peer reviewed, LLMs must be human-audited and are already being done. After all, intelligence may be artificial, but responsibility is human. At Indium, we deliver high-quality assurance and LLM testing services that enhance model performance, ensuring your AI systems are reliable, accurate, and scalable for enterprise applications. Our expert approach ensures that AI models and AI validations are at their best, reducing errors and building trust in automated systems. Let's ensure your AI never misses a beat. Frequently asked questions on AI hallucinations and HITL testing. 1. Can AI models be trained to recognize their own hallucinations in real-time?

Yes, AI can identify some hallucinations in real-time with feedback loops and hallucination detectors, but the accuracy is still limited. 2. Are AI hallucinations completely preventable? No, hallucinations aren't entirely preventable, but they can be significantly reduced through better training, grounding, and human validation. 3. Can HITL testing identify patterns of failure that traditional AI validation methods might miss? Yes, HITL testing can identify failure patterns by leveraging human expertise to spot subtle errors that traditional AI validation might overlook.

This human oversight helps uncover edge cases and complex scenarios where AI models might struggle. Thank you for listening to this Hacker Noon story, read by Artificial Intelligence. Visit HackerNoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.