Evaluating Agents and Hallucinations

4 min
Audience
ages 10–15
Time
20 to 30 min
Module
4/5
Badge to earn
Truth Detector

Today's mission

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to explain what a hallucination is and why it happens, list three ways to reduce it, and describe how engineers evaluate whether an agent is actually reliable.

The idea in one picture

Imagine a classmate who confidently answers every question in class, even the ones they don't actually know. They never say "I'm not sure." They sound impressive! But some of those confident answers are simply made up, and you would have no way of telling which ones without checking each one yourself. That confident-but-wrong answer is a hallucination. And the act of checking, systematically, over many questions, is evaluation. Sounding sure and being right are two different things, for classmates and for AI.

Preview — the rest of the lesson is for enrolled readers.

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This lesson is part of the “Safety and reliability” module

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