Four rules developers use to stop AI support bots fabricating answers

AI support bots that invent answers can mislead customers and erode trust, making honesty a critical design priority. The team behind Deacon, an AI support agent powered by company documentation, has outlined four rules to prevent hallucination in retrieval-based bots. These include restricting the model to only cited source passages, prohibiting it from combining separate facts into unsupported claims, prompting it to ask clarifying questions before admitting defeat, and logging unanswered queries so knowledge gaps can be filled over time. The rules address a core limitation of language models, which naturally predict plausible text without distinguishing between retrieved content and training data. Developers are encouraged to test their own bots with questions designed to tempt cross-passage inference, as this is where most fabrications occur.