Inferential hallucination
An error in AI-generated legal analysis in which real, accurately cited authorities are joined by reasoning that no recognized doctrinal mechanism supports, producing a conclusion that looks sound but rests on no legitimate legal foundation.
First used in The Twelve Bridges
A factual hallucination, such as an invented case, can be caught by database lookup. An inferential hallucination cannot, because every component exists. The defect lies in the structure connecting the authorities, and no citation database can verify whether an argument is well constructed.
The standard example groups Brown v. Board of Education, Gideon v. Wainwright and Roe v. Wade into a principle that government power over individuals is presumptively limited: three constitutional provisions, three rationales, and no court that ever synthesized them.
The Twelve Bridges framework detects such errors structurally. It checks a synthesis against the recognized bridges and against eight fault patterns that imitate them, much as a type-checker verifies that a program is well formed without verifying that its output is correct.