Steal my AI fact-checking prompt

One prompt turns any AI into a nitpicking fact-checker—and fights AI hallucinations

You can vastly improve the quality of your AI results with one simple prompt: a prompt that turns your AI into a nitpicking fact-checker.

That’s the secret I share in my latest piece for The Wall Street Journal , and today I’m giving you the full prompt, as well as a few ways to adjust it for your particular needs.

This prompt is valuable because getting AI to do your research is like hiring a research assistant with a taste for LSD. Sure, you might get useful results a lot of the time, but some portion of what the AI tells you will be pure delusion—and there’s no easy way to know the truth from the lies.

But AI is fast displacing Google as the default way to answer a question, get a quick handle on a topic, or look up key business information. Using a follow-up fact-checking prompt is the way you turn these efficient but inaccurate results into something a whole lot more accurate.

As I note in my story:

I now make a point of getting AI to check every fact it gives me. It still isn’t foolproof, and it is wise to use an actual flesh-and-blood human to fact-check anything you must get right. But using AI for a round of fact-checking can make the human fact-checking process go faster.

How to use this prompt

When you’ve used AI to give you a quick briefing on a person or topic, generate a spreadsheet full of contact information, or draft a document that cites other sources and articles, take the extra two minutes to run the results through a fact-checking prompt—before you let your innocent eyeballs gaze upon what is likely to be at least partially inaccurate information.

Create AI outputs you can fact-check effectively

You’ll get the best results from a fact-checking prompt if you apply some rigor to your first prompt (the one that generates the results you’re going to fact-check). When you ask AI to do research, compile information, or create a draft, tell it that you expect a specific source citation for every single fact or assertion it gives you, and to include a link for each source. Tell it where to find its sources: major newspapers, peer-reviewed journals, industry publications—whatever is relevant and appropriate to your task.