Stop AI hallucinations before you hit publish

Welcome to Prompt, Tinker, Innovate —my AI playground. Each edition gives you a hands-on experiment to sharpen your thinking and power up your work. This week, we're tackling one of the biggest risks in using AI: the confident, convincing, and completely false 'hallucination.' We'll build a final safety check to catch these errors before they can damage your credibility.

This week’s playground: Catching AI hallucinations with an AI

This week, we’re fighting fire with fire. We are turning one AI into a meticulous fact-checker to hunt down the plausible-sounding fictions that another AI (or even a human) might have inserted into a text. This is your pre-publication defense system.

Why this matters

An AI hallucination isn't just a quirky error; it's a credibility bomb waiting to go off in your work. These fabricated 'facts' can seem so plausible that they're incredibly dangerous. The most famous example from 2023 is the New York lawyer who submitted a legal brief filled with AI-hallucinated case law. This wasn't just a mistake; it was a public demonstration of what happens when hallucinations make it past the final edit, causing real-world consequences.

Use case spotlight: The pre-publication scan

When you use AI to generate drafts or brainstorm ideas, hallucinations can slip into your text almost without notice. Manually checking every single point in a long document is tedious. A final "pre-publication scan" using an AI fact-checker is the most efficient way to hunt them down.

One productivity hack is to use this "AI vs. AI" approach as a final quality gate, ensuring the speed gained from AI content generation isn't lost to embarrassing, reputation-damaging errors.

Your AI experiment: Try this prompt

👉 Time to tinker: Copy the prompt below. Paste it into your favorite AI tool with web-browsing capabilities and then upload or paste your completed draft—a blog post, a report, marketing copy—directly below the prompt and run it.

A crucial reminder: The goal here is to speed up the process, not to skip it. The AI will find the sources and flag claims, but it is still your job to review the links and make the final judgment on their credibility. This prompt is a powerful research assistant, not a replacement for the critical human eye.

📝 Prompt: “Act as a meticulous fact-checker and research analyst. Your task is to analyze the following text for potential AI hallucinations and factual inaccuracies before its final publication. Your primary goal is to verify every claim, statistic, date, and quote.

For each claim you identify, follow these steps:

1. Extract the Claim: Isolate the specific, verifiable statement.

2. Verification: Search for credible, authoritative primary sources to confirm or deny the claim.

3. Status Assessment: Assign one of the following statuses: Verified: The claim is accurate and supported by a credible source. Potentially Inaccurate: The claim contradicts information found in credible sources or appears to be a hallucination. Unverifiable: There are no readily available, credible sources to confirm the claim.

4. Source & Notes: Provide a brief explanation for your assessment and cite the URL of the primary source(s) used for verification.

Present your findings in a structured markdown table with the following columns: | Claim | Status | Source & Notes |

Here is the text to analyze:"

[Paste your text here]

💡 Pro tip: Dig deeper

Once you get your initial report, don't stop there. Use these follow-ups:

• For "potentially inaccurate" claims: "For every inaccurate claim you found, please provide the correct information, citing your source."

• Triangulate critical data: "For the most important statistic in the text, '[paste the specific statistic here]', find three separate, credible sources that confirm it. Display the findings in a table."

• Check for timeliness and context: "Review the key statistics in this text. For each one, identify its original publication year. Flag any data older than 2023 and comment on whether its age impacts the argument being made in September 2025."

What did you discover?

This is where the real innovation happens. Did this scan give you the confidence to hit "publish"? Did it catch a subtle hallucination that you had missed?