We put an AI helper in our course and spent weeks teaching it to say I don't know

The easy part was making it talk

We wanted a helper inside our course that could answer student questions about the material. Getting it to answer was a weekend. You wire up a model, feed it the lesson content, students ask things, it responds. Demos great. Everyone claps.

Then a student asked it something we had never covered, and it made up an answer. Confident, fluent, wrong. It invented a feature that does not exist and told the student to go use it. That was the moment the real project started, and the real project had almost nothing to do with generating text. It was about the opposite. Teaching the thing to stop.

Most of the weeks after launch went into three problems. Scoping what it was allowed to know. Getting it to refuse instead of invent. And knowing when to get out of the way and hand a student to a person. I want to walk through each, because the honest version of building an AI helper is mostly this, not the demo.

Scoping what it knows