Check AI output before you use it

Reviewing AI output is a skill with a repeatable order, and doing it in the wrong order wastes time. Check facts first, because a beautifully written paragraph built on an invented detail is worthless. Then check completeness: did it answer the actual question, or a nearby easier one? Then check voice and finally check format. Editing polish before checking truth is the most common review mistake, and it is how invented claims survive into published work. The specific things to hunt for are predictable. Invented specifics — statistics, dates, prices, names, citations, regulations — are the highest-risk category, and the giveaway is confident precision you did not supply. Quiet omissions come next: the tool answers what it can and skips what it cannot, without flagging the gap. Then softening, where a firm decision you asked for comes back hedged into mush. Then sameness, where the output is fluent but says nothing a competitor could not also say. Build the review into the request itself. Asking for output in a structure you can scan — bullets, a table, labeled sections — makes gaps visible instantly. Asking the tool to mark anything it inferred rather than was told surfaces risk before you go hunting for it. And keeping a personal list of the errors this tool makes on your work turns review from a vague read-through into a thirty-second checklist. Review discipline decays fastest when output quality improves, because good drafts train you to trust them. Keeping a written checklist protects you from your own growing confidence. Reading aloud is the cheapest review upgrade available. Invented facts and hedged non-answers both sound wrong out loud in a way they do not look wrong on screen. An insurance agent caught a fabricated coverage limit in a client summary only because her checklist required her to verify every number against the policy document. The draft read perfectly and the figure was wrong by a factor of ten.

Key takeaways

• The specific things to hunt for are predictable.
• Build the review into the request itself.
• Polishing a draft that contains an invented fact wastes the polish.

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