Checking an answer before you rely on it
Where Orsola is strong, where it slips, and the handful of things worth checking yourself.
What Orsola is good at, and where it slips
It is reliable when it is working from something you gave it, and less reliable when it is working from memory.
| Trust it more | Check it more |
|---|---|
| Summarising a document you attached | Facts and figures it produced from nowhere in particular |
| Finding something in your mail or calendar | Anything about very recent events |
| Drafting, rewriting, changing tone | Arithmetic across many numbers |
| Pulling structure out of messy text | Quotations, citations and links it did not fetch |
The failure worth understanding is that a wrong answer looks exactly like a right one. It does not sound uncertain when it is guessing — so confidence in the wording is not evidence of accuracy.
Ask it to show where something came from
The single most useful habit. When an answer matters, ask:
- "Which section of the document says that?"
- "Quote the sentence you based that on."
- "Was that from the file I attached, or from your own knowledge?"
Two things happen. You get something checkable, and the answer tends to be more careful in the first place — being asked to point at a source discourages a confident guess.
If it cannot show you a source, treat the claim as a starting point rather than a fact.
Worth checking yourself — numbers, dates, names, quotes
A short list, because these are the ones that cause real damage when wrong and are quick to verify:
- Numbers you are going to act on or repeat.
- Dates and deadlines, especially ones it worked out rather than read.
- Names and titles of people you are about to write to.
- Anything in quotation marks, and any link or citation.
The rule of thumb: if being wrong would embarrass you or cost money, check it. Everything else, let it go.
Tell it when it is wrong
Say what is wrong, in the same conversation — "the deadline is the 14th, not the 4th". It corrects and carries the correction forward.
That works better than "that's wrong, try again", which often produces the same answer in different words because you have not told it what to change.
If an answer was not merely unhelpful but harmful or plainly false, report something that looks wrong or unsafe — we cannot fix what we do not see.
Where to go next
Giving Orsola the source material is the best way to get answers worth trusting — add a document, photo, or spreadsheet.