When you leave a gap, AI fills it
A model completes text; it does not decline. Leave a gap in the prompt and the gap gets filled with the most plausible-sounding continuation, which is exactly what a fabrication is. So vagueness doesn't produce a vague answer, it produces a confident wrong one, and the confidence is unrelated to whether the gap was filled from anything real. The fix is to constrain the answer space before you ask: name the scope, the format, what counts as out of scope, and explicitly authorise 'I don't know'. Distinct lever: ambiguity converts into fabrication rather than into hedging.
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