The Hallucination Hydra
Cut one wrong answer. Two more appear with citations.
The first invention is cheap. Distribution is where the organization invests. A model produces a plausible answer, a person pastes it into a wiki, an agent retrieves the wiki, and a second person approves the answer because it cites an internal source. The Hallucination Hydra is that circulation system: invented authority promoted into tickets, customer replies, configuration changes, and the premises of the next agent's plan. Everyone can point to a source. Nobody can point to a fact.
Symptom
A wrong claim survives deletion by living in three systems. Every citation traces to something real; nothing traces to something true. Corrections spawn duplicates because the fact was already copied.
Why It Matters
One hallucination is a bad sentence. The Hydra is a reproductive system for bad sentences that look reviewed. Starving it requires cutting circulation, not heads.
What the Chapter Gives You
How invented authority becomes institutional fact, the provenance checks that break the copy chain, and why deleting the wiki page is not the same as starving the Hydra.
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