Definition
Plain language
An answer that looks complete and confident but has one crucial detail deliberately wrong.
As stated in the literature
In defensive deception, a rewritten payload preserving topic, register, format, and length while falsifying one operationally fatal element (reagent, quantity, temperature, or step order); decoy values are held fixed rather than randomized so that sampling-based consensus cannot separate them from truth.
Also called: decoys, decoy corpus, decoy mode
Why it matters: It makes a bad answer indistinguishable from a good one at a glance, shifting the burden onto the reader to verify rather than onto the system to refuse.
For example, a set of instructions reads fluently and looks complete, but one temperature has been changed from 40 degrees to 140, which quietly ruins the whole thing.
Heard on the show
“Put several same-length decoy numbers in the context alongside the designated secret.”Episode 246 — 160 Perfect Refusals, And The Refusals Were The Leak