Bug or Feature? When to Leverage AI Hallucinations for Creative Tasks

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room when it comes to AI in business: AI hallucinations. It’s a term that sounds dramatic, maybe even a little scary, and it’s one of the biggest sources of anxiety I hear about when talking to leaders about adopting generative AI tools.

You’ve probably heard the stories or maybe even experienced it— asking an AI a question and getting an answer that sounds plausible but is completely wrong, misleading, or just… made up. It’s understandable why this causes hesitation.

It’s a valid source of anxiety for leaders considering integrating generative AI into their operations. How can you entrust critical business tasks to a technology that can seemingly invent information? This feeling of uncertainty can feel like a significant barrier to unlocking the true potential of these powerful new capabilities.

But what if I told you that AI "hallucinations" can have a use for businesses? In this article, we’ll explore the ways you can leverage AI hallucinations for creative purposes while still being diligent to ensure you’re getting accurate information when you need it.

Understanding the "Creative" Side of AI

Think about how these Large Language Models (LLMs)—the engines behind tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and the AI within JoySuite—actually work. They are trained on vast amounts of text and data, learning patterns, relationships, and structures in language. When you ask them a question or give them a prompt, they generate a response by predicting the most likely sequence of words based on that training.

Sometimes, to create a coherent or novel response, especially when asked something open-ended or requiring synthesis, the AI needs to generate connections or ideas that weren't explicitly present in its training data. This is where the "making things up" part comes in.

Now, if you ask an AI to write a poem about a futuristic city or brainstorm marketing slogans, this ability to generate novel connections is exactly what you want! If AI could only regurgitate facts it was explicitly trained on, it wouldn’t be very useful for creative tasks, drafting new content, or exploring possibilities. You wouldn't ask a human known only for fact-checking to write your next ad campaign, right? You want someone who can imagine, invent, and connect ideas in new ways.

So, the ability to generate novel information isn't inherently bad. The problem arises when this isn't controlled—when the AI generates seemingly factual information that isn't accurate, especially when you need reliable, factual answers based on specific data. 

JoySuite's Solution: Grounding, Citations, and Building Confidence

At Neovation, as we were designing JoySuite’s capabilities, we recognized this challenge early on. We knew that for businesses to adopt AI confidently—especially for critical knowledge work—there needed to be a mechanism for trust and verification. That’s why we built Joy with two core principles to manage AI creativity and ensure AI accuracy:

1. Grounding in your knowledge:

First and foremost, JoySuite (specifically the Knowledge Assistant and Knowledge Coach) is designed to be grounded in your organization's verified information stored within the JoySuite Knowledge Centre. When you ask a question, JoySuite’s primary directive is to find the answer within your specific documents, policies, procedures, and other assets. This immediately narrows the field and significantly reduces the likelihood of the AI inventing answers unrelated to your business context. It forces the AI to prioritize your reality.

2. Transparency through citations:

This is where we directly tackle the trust issue. Whenever JoySuite provides a piece of factual information from your Knowledge Center content, it includes a citation as to where it pulled the information. This isn't just a vague reference; it's typically a direct link or clear indicator pointing to the specific document, page, or even section where that information was found.

Think about this example:

• An employee asks the JoySuite Knowledge Assistant: "What is our company policy on parental leave?"
• JoySuite provides the key details of the policy and includes a citation directly linking to the official HR Policy document in the Knowledge Centre.

This simple mechanism is incredibly powerful. It provides complete transparency. The user doesn't have to blindly trust the AI's answer. They can instantly click the citation and verify the information against the original, authoritative source document. It turns the AI from a potential black box into a helpful, transparent guide to your company's knowledge.