Facts It Invented and You Published

Where the responsibility sits

A tool producing a wrong statement is a known characteristic of the tool.

A wrong statement on your website, under your business name, is a claim you have made to your customers.

Nobody reading it knows or cares how it got there, and the fact that a machine produced it is not a defence anybody will accept.

Which makes verification part of publishing rather than an optional extra step.

The categories that go wrong most

• Numbers: statistics, percentages, costs.
• Standards and their reference numbers.
• Regulations and what they require.
• Dates and deadlines.
• Names of organisations and bodies.
• Quotations attributed to people.

The second is the dangerous one for trades. A plausible-looking standard number attached to a claim about your work reads as authoritative to a customer and can be entirely fabricated, and it is exactly the kind of detail nobody thinks to check.

What each kind of error costs

Since the consequences differ and the response should too.

A wrong statistic in a blog post is embarrassing and is unlikely to harm anybody.

A wrong price or timescale on a service page creates an expectation you then have to argue with a customer about.

A wrong statement about a regulation, a standard, or what is legally required can cause a customer to do something wrong, and that is a different order of problem.

And a claim about your own qualifications or certifications that is not true is a serious matter regardless of how it arrived.

So check hardest where the consequence is largest, which is not always where the error is most likely.

A worked example

A business published a page drafted with a machine that included a specific regulation number and a stated requirement about installation.

The number existed and referred to something else, and the requirement described was not accurate for their province.

A customer quoted it back at them during a dispute about work already done.

Resolving it took two conversations and cost more time than writing the page had saved.

The page had been checked for tone and readability and not for whether the regulation number was real.

Which is the common shape of this: the editing pass happens, and it is the wrong kind of editing.

Build the check into the workflow

Rather than relying on remembering.

Before publishing anything drafted this way, extract every factual claim into a list.

That is usually five to fifteen items on a service page, which is a manageable number.

Check each against a source you would be willing to show a customer, and mark it.

Anything you cannot verify comes out rather than staying in with a caveat.

The list takes ten minutes and it is the difference between having checked and believing you did.

It sounds most confident where it is least reliable

Which removes the signal people normally use.

Human writing carries hedging when the writer is unsure: probably, I think, from memory.

Machine output is uniformly confident, so the sentence containing a fabricated standard number reads exactly like the sentence containing a well-known fact.

That means you cannot rely on your own sense of which parts to check.

The only workable approach is checking all of the factual claims rather than the ones that feel uncertain.

Anybody editing this material needs telling that explicitly, since the instinct to check the doubtful bits is normally sound and here it is not.

Asking it to verify does not work

Worth stating, since it is the obvious thing to try.

Asking whether a statement is correct produces another confident answer generated the same way.

Asking for sources frequently produces plausible-looking references that do not exist, which is worse than no sources at all because it looks like verification.

Checking means going to the actual regulator, the actual standards body, or the actual publication.

For a Canadian business that usually means a provincial or federal source, which takes a search and a minute.

What to do about pages already published

Since most businesses reading this have some.

List the pages drafted this way over the last few months.

Go through them for the categories above, prioritising anything about regulations, standards, prices, or your own credentials.

Correct rather than delete where the page is otherwise sound, and note what you changed.

Where a customer may have relied on something wrong, say so directly rather than quietly amending it, which is both the right thing and the smaller problem.

Tell whoever is doing the writing

Since the person drafting is frequently not the person who understands this.

An assistant, a junior, or a supplier asked to produce pages quickly will use these tools, whether or not anybody discussed it.

Give them the rule directly: every number, standard, regulation, date, and organisation name gets checked against a real source before it goes up.

Say why, since the reason is counterintuitive and somebody who understands it will apply it to cases you did not anticipate.

And make clear that removing an unverifiable claim is the correct answer rather than a failure, because the instinct is to keep it and hedge.

Keep the source beside the claim

A small discipline that saves the work being repeated.

When you verify a figure or a regulation, note where you checked it and the date, in the draft rather than anywhere formal.

Six months later, when somebody asks whether a claim is still current or a rule has changed, that note is the difference between a minute and an hour.

It also means whoever edits the page next does not remove the check by rewriting the sentence around it.

Strip the notes before publishing, or keep them in a separate document alongside the page, whichever fits how you work.

The counter-case

This is manageable rather than disqualifying.

The same risk exists with any writer who is unfamiliar with your trade, and businesses have always had to check what was written for them.

Much of what these tools produce contains no checkable claims at all, being description and structure rather than fact.

And the workflow of supplying your own facts largely removes the exposure, since the tool is then arranging rather than asserting.

Extract the factual claims, check each against a real source, and remove what you cannot verify.

Before publishing

1. List every factual claim.
2. Check numbers against a real source.
3. Verify any standard or regulation.
4. Confirm names of organisations.
5. Remove what you cannot verify.
6. Check hardest where the consequence is largest.
7. Review pages already published.

Step five is the discipline that matters, since the temptation is always to keep a useful-sounding claim and soften it rather than to take it out.

Why it does this is covered in what it gets confidently wrong.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.