Teaching Verification

Confidence is not accuracy

These systems produce fluent, well-structured text whether or not the content is correct. Fluency is the whole problem: students are used to treating polish as a signal of reliability, and here that signal is absent.

A checkable claim is a claim with a source

Teach one habit above all others: any factual claim the tool produces must be traced to something that is not the tool. Names, dates, statistics, quotations, page numbers, and citations are the highest risk, because they are exactly what these systems invent most fluently.

The three-question check

1. Where would this be published if it were true?
2. Does that source say it, in those words?
3. If I cannot find the source in five minutes, do I still want to submit this?

Model failure in public

Ask a tool something in your own subject where you know the literature well, then walk the class through what it got subtly wrong. Students who have watched a teacher catch a plausible error learn more than students who have been told errors happen.