How to Check Inaccurate or Incomplete AI Answers
Symptoms
An AI answer may sound polished yet contain invented facts, incorrect calculations, outdated instructions, broken citations, missing exceptions, or a summary that changes the meaning of the source. It may contradict itself between responses, claim certainty without evidence, or ignore part of your request. NIST identifies “confabulation” as confidently presented false or erroneous content and describes it as a core generative AI risk. Treat fluency as writing quality, not proof of correctness.
Safe checking steps
- Identify the decision behind the answer. The higher the consequence, the stronger the review needed. Do not rely on AI alone for legal, financial, medical, safety, employment, security, or other high-impact decisions. Route those matters to the appropriate qualified person and approved process.
- Break the response into checkable claims. Highlight names, dates, figures, quotations, procedures, links, and statements that use words such as always, never, required, or guaranteed. These deserve individual verification.
- Return to primary sources. Check laws on official government sites, product behavior in current vendor documentation, workplace rules in approved policies, and facts in the original record. Prefer the source that created or governs the information over a blog that repeats it.
- Open every citation. Confirm that the page exists, is from the claimed organization, is current enough for the task, and actually supports the nearby statement. Search within the source for the relevant phrase. An authentic link can still be unrelated or misrepresented.
- Check completeness, not just correctness. Compare the answer with the original question and source. Look for omitted limitations, prerequisites, dates, units, regional differences, licensing terms, exceptions, and steps that require approval. Ask the AI to list uncertainties or assumptions, but verify that list independently.
- Recalculate numbers with an approved calculator, spreadsheet, or source system. Confirm units, rounding, time zones, tax treatment, and input values. Never supply confidential business data to an unapproved AI tool just to repeat a calculation.
- Ask for a revised answer that separates facts, assumptions, and unknowns. Request short quotations and source links when appropriate. This can make review easier, but it does not make the result trustworthy by itself.
- Compare against a second independent authoritative source when the claim is important or disputed. If credible sources disagree, preserve the disagreement and escalate to the responsible subject matter expert instead of choosing the answer you prefer.
- Review the final wording yourself. Remove unsupported claims, label uncertainty, add verified citations, and obtain any required human approval. Keep a clear distinction between AI-generated draft text and confirmed facts.
What not to do
Do not accept an answer because it is detailed, confident, or agrees with you. Do not cite sources you have not opened. Do not ask the same model repeatedly until it produces the preferred answer. Do not use AI output as evidence that a policy, person, quote, court case, study, or product feature exists. Do not paste passwords, MFA codes, secrets, customer data, health data, financial data, source code, contracts, or confidential documents to improve the answer.
When to escalate
Stop and seek expert review when sources conflict, the answer could affect rights, money, health, safety, compliance, security, employment, or a customer commitment, or when you cannot verify a key claim. Report the issue to support if an approved AI tool repeatedly invents links, exposes unrelated private information, or produces unsafe instructions after a simple, appropriate request.
What to include in a ticket
Provide the tool name, date and time, general task type, the incorrect claim in redacted form, expected behavior, source URLs that show the discrepancy, and whether retrying with a simple non-sensitive prompt reproduced it. Include model or feature name if displayed. Do not include the original confidential prompt or any restricted data. Redact screenshots and files before attachment.