Frictionless Verification of AI Claims

"Sometimes the AI just makes stuff up" is a problem I don't really expect to go away. In the nearterm, AI is going to keep occasionally hallucinating, or misinterpreting information. Eventually, AI will be powerful enough we need to be worried if it's presenting misleading information on purpose. There might be a nice window where the AI is powerful enough to not make things up but non-agentic enough that we don't have to worry about deliberate manipulation. But, even then, interpreting data is tricky.I'm worried about this for my own use, but, I'm more worried about this on the global scale. I'm worried about people trusting things AI made up, and I'm worried about the internet proliferating with slop that makes it harder to even find original statements that are a human's real testimony.An approach that might help is to make AI reports more "Verification centric." i.e. designed from the ground up to make it as easy and frictionless to verify as possible.Right now, some AI chatbots provides little citation-links. That's better than not-having-them. But, those are a pain to open and investigate. Probably you very rarely do so.So, imagine a world where when you answer a question, the AI doesn't guess. Instead:It finds a primary source. It answers with an exact quote from that source (with enough context for you to evaluate yourself what the quote means).UI lets you quickly expand the quote into the full document, with the quote highlighted, if you want more context.It names the author of the quote.Some fast/dumb AIs do a sanity check that the quote is accurately transcribed. "Quote" here can mean both "a paragraph of prose" or "a table of data." The AI is allowed to truncate text to make it easier to read, but not to make up text.In this world, "hunt down primary sources" would be one of the main skills AIs are trained to do. (Maybe, pretraining data would be labeled such primary sources are more directly "available" to it's fast-response intuitions). I've built myse