Research

Background on an organisation, precedent from another country, the state of the evidence on a question you have to write about by next week. Research is the task where AI gets used most casually.

It is also where AI fails in the most damaging way. These tools produce citations that look exactly like real ones: a plausible author, a plausible journal, a link that looks like it works. Some are real. Some were invented a second ago, and nothing in the answer marks the difference. Ask ChatGPT for search terms and for the institutions that publish on your topic, then go and find the documents yourself.

Watch out for this

Never cite a source you have not opened yourself. Treat every reference as a guess about what might exist, and find it independently before it goes near your report. The same goes for numbers: a statistic with no document behind it is not a statistic. An organisation can lose years of credibility over one invented footnote.