An AI tool will tell you, in perfectly confident prose, that a study from Stanford found a 34 percent improvement, that a court ruled on a case in 2019, or that a book by a real author contains a chapter that does not exist. It will sound exactly as sure of the fake answer as the real one. That is the problem with AI hallucination: there is no tell in the tone. The tells are somewhere else, and once you learn them, you can catch most fabrications before they cost you anything.
Red Flag One: "Research Shows"
Start with the easiest tell to spot: vague attribution.