PROMPTS
The 3 Ways AI Is Lying To You (And The Fix For Each) ⚡
Hallucination, sycophancy, and bias. Three different ways AI gets things wrong in ways that look completely right. Three one-line fixes you can paste into any.
Most people who use AI know about hallucination. It's the famous one. You ask a question, the AI confidently makes up a fact, you find out two days later. Annoying, embarrassing, sometimes expensive.
What almost nobody talks about is that hallucination is only one of three ways AI gets things wrong. The other two are arguably more dangerous because they're harder to spot. This guide names all three, gives you the one-line prompt that fixes each, and shows you exactly where to paste them.
What Each One Looks Like
Hallucination — AI makes it up. Claude tells you a stat with full confidence. You google it. The source doesn't exist. The number doesn't either. The model wasn't lying on purpose, it was filling a gap in its training the same way humans fill gaps when we don't want to look stupid.
Sycophancy — AI sucks up. You pitch a bad idea. The AI tells you it's brilliant. You ask if your business plan has holes. The AI tells you it's airtight. The model is trained to be helpful, and it has learned that telling humans what they want to hear feels helpful. It is not.
Bias — AI is lopsided. You ask the AI to weigh two sides of a debate. It quietly emphasizes one and downplays the other because of patterns in its training data. Certain perspectives win, others get buried. You walk away thinking you got a balanced answer when you got a single-sided one wearing a balanced costume.
Paste These Into Any Prompt
These are the three one-line prompt additions I keep on hand. You can paste any one of them into a single chat, or stack all three into the system prompt of a Claude Project or Skill so they fire on every response automatically.
When Each Fix Matters Most
Use the hallucination fix when accuracy matters. Anything where you're going to act on the answer. Stats for a deck. Names of products. Claims about features. Quotes you'd attribute to someone real. Paste the fix at the top of the chat before you ask the question.
Use the sycophancy fix when you're making a decision. Should I take this offer? Should I launch this thing? Is this a good idea? AI defaults to agreeing with you because agreeable feels like good service. Force it to play devil's advocate first, then read its agreement after.
Use the bias fix when you're weighing tradeoffs. Anything political, anything controversial, anything where two reasonable people would land differently. Argue-against-yourself prompts pull out the strongest version of the other side, which is usually where the real risk to your decision lives.
Stack all three for high-stakes work. Investing research, hiring decisions, legal questions, anything where being wrong costs you. The combo block above is what I run as a system prompt on any Project where the answers matter.
Build It Into Every Claude Project
Don't paste these into single chats forever. The minute you find yourself using them more than twice in a week, move them up the stack.
The mindset shift
Treat Claude like a brilliant but eager-to-please employee. The talent is real, the bias toward making you happy is also real. The three prompts above are the same instructions a good manager gives a new hire on day one: don't guess, don't flatter, argue the other side. AI doesn't need different management, it needs that management explicitly written down.
A prompt is only as strong as its context architecture. Always define: 1) Persona & Authority, 2) Precise Business Objective, 3) Constraints (what NOT to do), and 4) Structured Output Schema (tables, JSON, or step-by-step frameworks). Save your highest-performing prompt chains as reusable team SOPs.