Law 12 · Retrieval & Memory
Grounding Is Not a Guarantee
Retrieval reduces hallucination. It doesn't eliminate it.
The principle
Vendors marketed RAG legal tools as 'hallucination-free', but a Stanford audit found they still made things up 17 to 33% of the time. Handing the model a source doesn't force it to use that source faithfully. It can misread it, over-generalize, or cite a real document for a claim the document never makes. Grounding lowers the error rate. It never gets it to zero.
The mechanism, the warning signs, a worked example, and the apply-it recipe for this law are in the complete edition.
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