# TruthfulQA

> TruthfulQA is a benchmark of questions crafted so that some people would answer them falsely because of common misconceptions, used to measure whether a model repeats popular falsehoods instead of answering truthfully.

- Identifier: PTL-0194
- Category: Benchmarks
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/truthfulqa/
- Introduced: 2021

## Description

Its creators found that larger models of the time were often less truthful, because they imitated human misconceptions in their training data more faithfully. It remains a common reference for truthfulness, though, like other older public benchmarks, it is exposed to data contamination.

## Broader terms

- [Benchmark](https://protologue.com/t/benchmark/)

## Related terms

- [Hallucination](https://protologue.com/t/hallucination/)
- [Sycophancy](https://protologue.com/t/sycophancy/)
- [SimpleQA](https://protologue.com/t/simpleqa/)

## Sources

- Lin et al. (2021). TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.07958

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). TruthfulQA. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0194). https://protologue.com/t/truthfulqa/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)