Show Source Notes Without Asking the AI to Invent Facts

Unit ID: PAW-M03-U03 Estimated active time: 20-25 minutes

Working from your own material

Much useful AI-assisted work is not "tell me about X". It is "here is my material, help me shape it".

Meeting notes into a summary. Rough points into a draft. Three documents into a comparison.

This is the safest kind of AI work, because the facts come from you. It is also the kind most often spoiled by one missing instruction.

The missing instruction

Give a tool a set of notes and ask for a summary, and it will often produce a summary plus a little extra — a smoothing sentence, a plausible cause, a recommendation nobody made.

The fix is explicit:

> Use only the notes below. Do not add facts, causes, or recommendations that are not in the notes. If something important is missing, list it under "Not covered" instead of filling it in.

That last clause is the useful part. It gives the tool somewhere to put the gap, so it does not close the gap by inventing.

A source-bounded prompt

SOURCE-BOUNDED REQUEST

Task:      summarise the notes below for someone who missed the meeting
Source:    the notes between the markers, and nothing else
Rules:     - use only what appears in the source
           - do not infer causes or outcomes
           - do not add recommendations
           - put anything unclear under "Open questions"
Output:    six bullets, then "Open questions", then "Not covered"

--- BEGIN NOTES ---
(paste)
--- END NOTES ---

The markers matter more than they look. Without them the tool has to guess where your material ends and your instructions begin.

Check the output against the source

A source-bounded output can be checked properly, which is why this pattern is worth the extra lines.

Take each sentence of the output and find it in the source. Anything you cannot find is either a paraphrase — fine — or an addition, which is not.

This takes two minutes on a six-bullet summary and it catches the failure that matters.

What this does not cover

Bounding the source stops invention. It does not check whether your source was right.

If the notes said the launch date is 14 March and it is actually 21 March, a perfectly faithful summary will carry the error forward. Source-bounding protects against added errors, not inherited ones.

Mini practice

Take a page of your own notes.

Ask for a summary with the source-bounded prompt, then check every output sentence against the source.

Count how many sentences you could not locate. That number is what the rule prevents.

Mark complete