Grounding

Tying every answer to real source material: the AI may only answer from documents you handed it, ideally quoting where each claim came from. An ungrounded answer comes out of whatever the model (the AI itself — the part that reads and writes) absorbed from the open internet years ago. A grounded one comes out of your records.

An apprentice quoting your price list, versus an apprentice quoting what he reckons prices are.

Why it matters: grounding is the main defence against hallucination — the AI stating something untrue with complete confidence. "Is this grounded, and in what?" is the first question to ask about any AI that answers from company information. If nobody can tell you which documents it's reading, it's reading none of them.

Related: Hallucination · RAG