Double-check AI answers — and ask the model to double-check itself
25 episodes in 12 months · 41 total · first in May 2024
The model can be confidently wrong, adjust to you, or answer differently than it did yesterday. So on almost every important answer I say “double-check yourself” — and the system often finds the mistake on its own.
In serious matters — health, money, contracts — spell out a cross-check right in the request and ask it to go through the source material again. The decision and the responsibility still stay with you.
Standing rule. A standing rule: models are still being quietly changed without any announcement, and the same system can answer differently from day to day.
Where to start
On every important answer, write “double-check yourself”, and in matters of health and money ask for links to sources.
For contracts, reports and calculations, make a cross-check the rule: the model checks itself, a human makes the decision.
Do not demand perfection from AI: there is too much nitpicking at it over small mistakes, and people do not notice the strong effect.
“And here, I think, last time we also discussed this, that there's a lot of nitpicking at artificial intelligence, a lot, when, like, remember, earlier everyone was, like: hallucinations, it said something, output some word wrong or, like, skipped some letter. Uh, and not on where people, uh, see a super-strong effect from artificial intelligence.”
When I said it
Quotes
“For me too there was always the question why I personally, every time, on every answer from the system, say: recheck yourself, did you say it right or not. Often the system checks, says: “Oh, I made a mistake,” and gives the data.”
“I mean, essentially, I could have made a wrong, false decision. So some things, of course, you have to understand that they need to be rechecked. Well, the same way you re-, recheck when some other person tells you something, yeah.”
“…you can just put it in the prompt for it and tell it that after the calculation you have to do a cross-check, check, and then after the cross-check recheck once more taking these data sets into account, and at the end, in the document or in the answer, it can give you the cross-checks.”
“I strongly recommend to everyone who does serious things, just recently I'm telling, say, one partner of mine: “Listen, you're checking these legal documents, you absolutely must write in the chat, check it for me again, go through the base again for me, right.” And you have to get very used to this.”