Trust, then check. Three quick ways, none taking more than a minute. Do it often enough and it stops being a chore and turns into a reflex.
Do this
- Pick one specific claim it made earlier. A date, a number, a name, a rule. Something checkable, not an opinion.
- First way: ask it to show its work. Where does that come from? Can you link me to the source? Then actually open the link.
- Second way: search for it yourself, using the specific words from the claim. Thirty seconds, and it settles most things.
- Third way: ask a different assistant the same question cold. If two arrive at the same answer separately, it is probably right.
- Now decide which of your recent questions were worth checking and which were not.
Watch it done first, if you would rather
Let my human assistant John show you what that looks like. He does the same thing you are about to do, at the same speed, with nothing edited out.
Filming This one is not recorded yet. Everything you need is written out above, and the video will appear here when it is ready.
What just happened
When you asked for a source, one of two things happened. Either it gave you a real one, or it produced something that looked exactly like a real source and was not. Invented links and invented citations are a well-known version of what you saw at stop 8. Opening the link is the whole check.
The three ways get slower and more certain as you go down the list, so match the effort to the stakes. A recipe does not need checking. A dosage, a deadline, a dollar amount or anything you are about to repeat to somebody else does.
A rough rule that holds up: check anything you would be embarrassed to be wrong about, and anything you are about to act on.
This is also the honest answer to people who say AI cannot be trusted. It can be trusted about as far as a confident acquaintance who has read a great deal and never says when they are unsure. That is genuinely useful, as long as you know that is what it is.
If something did not go as expected
- The link it gave me does not exist.
- Then you have caught an invented source, which is exactly what this stop is training you to spot. Ask again, or search for the claim yourself.
- The two assistants disagreed.
- Useful information. At least one is wrong, so this is a claim to check properly or leave alone.
- This feels like a lot of work.
- It gets fast, and you will not do it for most things. The judgment about which answers deserve it is the skill, not the checking.
The view from here: A habit worth keeping for good