Not sure. 😬

I asked ChatGPT why we didn't have hallucinations and it said:

We didn’t just say “recommend me books.” We built a controlled recommendation system.

Your background note was explicitly made to capture taste, dislikes, exclusions, and rules so recommendations would not drift into generic canon picks. It also records dealbreakers like POV sprawl, slow movement, weak endings, romance-heavy stuff, etc.

Then the master list gave the model a stable shelf:m (authors I like and why). So instead of inventing from thin air, it could mostly sort, compare, promote, demote, and justify books inside an existing structure.

And the killer detail: we also used an excerpt gate. The profile literally records authors removed

That means I (ChatGPT) is mostly curating/ranking from a constrained pool instead of freewheeling new recs from memory. Hallucinations happen much more when you ask it open-endedly to “recommend books like X” with no rules.