AI can help list claims, identify missing context, and organize a verification worksheet. It cannot make a claim true by stating it confidently. Treat generated citations, summaries, and dates as leads to check, not completed verification.
01
Break the material into checkable claims
Separate names, dates, quotations, statistics, legal assertions, and causal conclusions. Ask what evidence would confirm or contradict each one. A statement that a company “resolved every complaint” needs a defined period, complaint set, and outcome record. A model may summarize that sentence neatly without noticing that none of those details were provided.
02
Open the original source
Check that a cited page exists, says what the answer claims, and applies to the relevant place and time. Read surrounding context and distinguish a proposal from an enacted rule or an allegation from a finding. NIST's generative-AI guidance identifies risks such as confabulation; fluent output is not a substitute for source inspection or expert review when the topic requires it.
- Record claim, source, relevant passage, date, and reviewer.
- Mark unsupported, contradicted, and unresolved claims separately.
- Keep private documents out of tools without appropriate authorization.
03
Make the human decision visible
For example, let AI group a long draft's claims, then have an editor verify the publication date and exact policy wording from official documentation. Save corrections and explain uncertainty in the final text. Do not automatically publish an accusation, a legal interpretation, or a customer-facing correction based solely on a model's output. Assign responsibility to a person who can explain the evidence.
Frequently asked questions
Can multiple AI systems confirm one another?
Agreement is not independent evidence when systems may repeat the same mistaken information. Verify the underlying sources instead of treating a vote among models as proof.
What should happen when no reliable source is found?
Remove or qualify the claim, or continue research. Do not fill the gap with an invented citation or a confident paraphrase of uncertainty.
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